Show Rresources: Here were the resources we covered in the episode: The last time Jim Habig was on the show LinkedIn is sunsetting Lookalike Audiences B2Believe Event where Ben Stiller spoke 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 LinkedIn Learning Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript: For the full show transcript, see the show notes page here: Episode 123

Show Rresources: Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Chandler Quintin on LinkedIn Contact Chandler This article talks about our experiments running fun ads Video Brothers LinkedIn Page 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 LinkedIn Learning Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript: For the full show transcript, see the show notes page here: Episode 122

Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Sparktoro post about Zero Click Experiences Thought Leader Ads Episode The post and interaction that inspired this 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 LinkedIn Learning Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript For the full show transcript, see the show notes page here: Episode 121

Here were the resources we covered in the episode: How LinkedIn treats Apple IDFA 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 LinkedIn Learning Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript For the full show transcript, see the show notes page here: Episode 120

Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Taina on LinkedIn 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 LinkedIn Learning Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript For the full show transcript, see the show notes page here: Episode 119

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Nancy Harhut on LinkedIn Nancy Harhut on X HBTMktg.com  Link to Nancy Harhut's book: Using Behavioral Science in Marketing 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 LinkedIn Learning Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript For the full show transcript, see the show notes page here: Episode 119

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Use cases for both excluding and targeting your current customers Demographics 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 LinkedIn Learning Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript For the full show transcript, see the show notes page here: Episode 117

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Creativity needed in marketing Who should and shouldn't advertise on LI 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 LinkedIn Learning Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript For the full show transcript, see the show notes page here: Episode 116

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: LinkedIn Ads Library Spying on competitors' ads 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 LinkedIn Learning Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript For the full show transcript, see the show notes page here: Episode 115

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Forrester B2B Buying Insights Website Demographics Episode Frequency Caps Episode Retargeting LinkedIn Traffic on Google and Meta 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 LinkedIn Learning Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript For the full show transcript, see the show notes page here: Episode 114

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Excel Reporting Walkthroughs on Youtube 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 LinkedIn Learning Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript For the full show transcript, see the show notes page here: Episode 113

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Market Research Episode Benchmarks GA4 Product Market Fit 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 LinkedIn Learning Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review!   Show Transcript 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 B2Linked's Youtube Channel LinkedIn Learning Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com 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

Show Transcript Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Chris Lavigne on LinkedIn CMO Scorecard Report 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 LinkedIn Learning Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com 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

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode:  Blog Post On Improving Lead Quality on LinkedIn Ads Virality on LinkedIn Demographics 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 LinkedIn Learning Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review!   Show Transcript For the full show transcript, see the show notes page here: Episode 109

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Bidding/Budgeting Relevancy Score & Auction 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 LinkedIn Learning Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review!   Show Transcript For the full show transcript, see the show notes page here: Episode 108

Show Resources 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 Follow AJ on LinkedIn B2Linked's Youtube Channel LinkedIn Learning Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review!   Show Transcript 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 Podcast@B2linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources 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 LinkedIn Learning Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review!   Show Transcript 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 Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources 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 LinkedIn Learning Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review!   Show Transcript 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 Podcast@B2inked.com. 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 Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week and I'm cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources 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 LinkedIn Learning Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review!   Show Transcript 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. AJ Wilcox Do not miss your chance to join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics Aommunity, go to Fanatics.B2Linked.com to get grandfathered into the best pricing that there will ever be for the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community. You'll get access to over four and a half hours of courses leading you from absolute zero to absolute LinkedIn Ads expert. Plus, you'll be a part of the community where you can bounce ideas and learn things from your fellow LinkedIn Ads experts. Now if this is your first time listening, welcome! We're excited to have you here. Make sure to hit that subscribe button. But if this is not your first time listening, please do go review the podcast on Apple podcasts. It is by far the best way that you can say thank you for all the hours that we put into coming out with this content every week. With any questions, suggestions, or corrections reach out to us at Podcast@B2linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. I'm cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Jae Oh's LinkedIn Profile Jim Habig's LinkedIn Profile Link to help doc for setting up Revenue Attribution Report B2Believe 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 LinkedIn Learning Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover or with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review!   Show Transcript Revenue Attribution Reporting just launched in your LinkedIn Ads account. What is it? I'm glad you asked. We're diving into the new functionality 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! As of July 1 of 2023, LinkedIn launched the Revenue Attribution Reporting tool within LinkedIn Ads. You can access it now, it just requires that you have business manager set up for your account. What the report does is it connects your LinkedIn Ads to your CRM, so you can get reporting further down in your sales process, which is super valuable. You've heard me talk about this before. This is a rare public beta. So there will continue to be further developments and new features added. This is just the beginning. To teach you about the revenue attribution report. I have not one guest, but two guests to drop hardcore knowledge bombs on you. The first is Jae Oh, you've heard me mentioned him on the podcast before. He's been with LinkedIn for five and a half years. And he's a director over product management. Jae and I go way back to 2018, where we met at a LinkedIn hosted customer advisory board event. And he's been over so many products that we've all worked with on LinkedIn Ads, he's awesome. The next heavy hitter I have for you is Jim Habig. You may remember him from Episode 79, when I highlighted his presentation at the B2Believe event in San Francisco. It was a fantastic presentation. I got to sit front row. Jim Habig is the Vice President of Marketing at LinkedIn, which I know, is really awesome. Now make sure to stick around to the very end, because I have some thoughts on this. Plus, I'll tell you exactly how to get it set up. First in the news. If you listen to episode 100, you'll already know about this, but we just launched the LinkedIn Ads fanatics community. And if you join before the end of July in 2023, you'll be grandfathered in to the lowest price that it will ever be. That's $59 a month. Inside the community, you'll have access to our four brand new courses taking you from the very beginnings of campaign manager all the way through our expert training. You'll also have access to our whole community of like minded LinkedIn Ads professionals that you can bounce ideas off of, ask questions, and of course, I'm in there, my whole team's in there, nd you can ask us anything. Go to fanatics.B2linked.com for more information there. I wanted to highlight a review that the podcast got. This one came from Sean Possemato. He's the head of operations at Cameron Digital Consulting out of Boston. And he said, "Great guy and a trusted resource. Fivestars. I've had the pleasure to get to know AJ professionally and a little bit on the personal side. He went out of his way when I was helping build out the next steps in my career five years ago. I'm competent in LinkedIn Ads, but always refer my network to AJ because I can trust that he will treat anyone I refer with the utmost respect and deliver quality results. Oh, yeah, amazing show. There aren't many, or any marketing podcasts that walk through actual data to learn from." Well, Shawn, a huge thank you for me, I really appreciate you leaving the review. So grateful, the contents helpful and so grateful, I could have been a helpful mentor to you in your career. And also thanks for the ride to and from the airport and getting to hang out with you whenever I'm in Boston. And to all you listeners, I want to feature you and shout you out here as well. So please do go leave us a review on Apple podcasts. Alright, with that being said, it's time to hop into the interview. Let's hit it. AJ Wilcox Alright, everyone. I'm so excited to have these interviews for you today. First off, Jae Oh, he's the director of product for LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, leading teams, building the audiences and measurement capabilities of the LinkedIn Ads platform. So Jae, super excited to have you here. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Anything I didn't cover in the intro? Jae Oh Hey, great to be here, AJ, thanks for having us on. Not covered in the intro is the fact that I'm probably getting less sleep than I ever did before with a two year old running around. I'll talk about that a little bit more later. AJ Wilcox Congratulations. Jae Oh Thank you. And of course, you know, there's always something going on these days with construction. And so we're renovating stuff. So outside of work, if you see me that's what I'm doing. Trying to build stuff inside the digital world as well as out, but really excited to be here. AJ Wilcox Cool. I've got five kiddos, none as young as two so you're battling right now. And I love the toddler stage. So congratulations on that. Jae Oh I'm going to stop complaining now. I'm going to withdraw my comment entirely. But kudos. AJ Wilcox Oh, it gets easier. The more kids you have, the more they entertain each other. So right now you're in like war territory. You got to give all your attention. I get it. First off, let me ask you what is the product that you're most focused on right now? Jae Oh Yeah, one thing that we have been focusing a lot on these days is how do we help our marketers tell them better story about the value that they drive in their day in day out workflows, right? As marketers, are you just showing ads, are you driving ads for a purpose. And one of those things we're trying to change is, you know, that value narrative has to come through in our products. So one product specifically is a revenue attribution report, we want to be able to help our marketers tell a better story that is effectively speaking to the bottom line of the business and is more than the clicks or the conversions or maybe even engagement rates that they've been maybe more routinely trained to talk about from vanity metrics perspective. AJ Wilcox I think this is so valuable, like this product, the Revenue Attribution Report. For the longest time I've looked from the outside, I've seen LinkedIn that has that much better targeting than any other platform has, and it charges a premium. So we know that we're going to get access to better and more qualified candidates, more qualified conversions, but we're going to pay more for them. And when you pay more for it, it means that you have to pay more attention and catch issues before they pop up. The biggest issue I've seen is people spending on LinkedIn, but not having the revenue intel to actually back it up. So I'm super excited about this, especially given economic uncertainty that we're seeing right now. Tell us a little bit about how the report works, when it's coming out, where we might access it, all that kind of stuff. Jae Oh Yeah, so it's early days for this product. And you should see us adding more support for more data, more events, more connections in terms of partners in future days. But right now, the Revenue Attribution Report lives in business manager, it attributes our CRM data. So our customers outcomes data to add engagement activities on LinkedIn to help our advertisers better understand and demonstrate the impact of marketing efforts on their actual business outcomes, whether that's new pipeline, or new opportunity, or new deals closing. So with marketers having increased accountability, drive sales results, they should be able to look at this and say, hey, this is where my money is going, hopefully, allowing them to justify the ad spend and unlock additional investments. So you should see at a metrics level things like top line, you know, return on adspend, or revenue one, or pipeline, how LinkedIn played a role in that, or maybe even at the funnel level, leads, open opportunities, closed one ops. And ultimately really more granular to when you want to start connecting the dots and campaigns. So conversions like win rates, average decent, close, average deal size. And by speaking at that level, as you addressed earlier, you know, in this time of uncertainty, what's most important is to understand how are you impacting the growth and sustainability of that business? Marketers should have the language to speak to that. AJ Wilcox So you mentioned that it's inside of business manager, does that mean that if you don't have your account attached to a business manager, you wouldn't get access to the Revenue Attribution Report? Jae Oh That's right at this point, that's true. Business manager is currently in an open beta right now so theoretically, any customer could go and set one up. Having said that, the reason why it should live there is because it should be looking across all your ad campaigns. You know, if we want to talk about return on adspend, it's not just for one campaign, especially when it's a B2B sales cycle, where as multiple touchpoints, many campaigns that might influence the deal within a day. AJ Wilcox Excellent. And I don't know if you're able to talk about the CRMs that have current integrations, or that are planning on having integrations, can you touch on that at all? Jae Oh So currently, we have Salesforce CRM that's integrated, we are planning for additional ones as we start talking to more customers, and certainly just a backlog that we need to work for. But you know, ultimately, at the end of the day, the same data applies in terms of the kinds of metrics that you would see so that you could understand the performance of the influence aspect. AJ Wilcox So it's an open beta right? Now, does that mean that you have to go to your HR rep right now and request access, Jae Oh if you're in business manager, you can actually connect it assuming if you have a Salesforce integration? If you have a rep great, it's even easier. But if you don't, you should be able to go into business manager and turn on the feature once you integrate your CRM system. AJ Wilcox Very cool. Is there a help doc and LinkedIn to help that walkthrough? Like wiring it up? Jae Oh There? Is there is it should be pretty easy to search. Yeah. AJ Wilcox Okay. Very cool. All right. Thanks for all of those initial questions, kind of understanding where it fits. What sort of requirements are there? What do you need set up on the back end in order for this to function properly? Jae Oh Yeah. So at a minimum, it would just be the CRM integration, and assuming you have the relevant fields to help us understand, you know, deal status, size, dates associated with it. Leads data, of course, as well as company data, these pieces are just foundational. Assuming that that is there, you know, we can certainly fire the report, and the plan is to support other data sources as well, in addition to other CRM sources that you asked about, AJ Wilcox Beautiful. How is this different from the offline conversions report that we can upload right now? Jae Oh Yeah, so two ways. Signal source and customer use case. So the signal source for CRM, as you'd expect is through our in product connector when right now we're supporting Salesforce, as I mentioned in business manager. The offline conversions is through an uploaded list or a server to server integration. So the source data already differs. While some customers offline conversion data could add heavy overlap with a CRM, it's not always the case so we're starting in terms of where do we know houses the data that we need to power the support so a customer can get value on day one. So the customer use cases the other one. So it's targeted towards customers who have supported CRMs, who would like to combine their data and do other things, maybe even like, you know ABM level can I understand, you know, for a company engagement is demonstrating business outcomes from marketing and driving specific companies to close or accounts to close, or customers have high sensitivity of sharing data. Offline conversions is different because it extends our online conversions data streams, as from the insight tag to offline conversion data, so you can optimize campaigns and support conversions reporting. Now, the logical question is, is there a possibility these two things converging? It is something that we're evaluating because we want to support as I mentioned, multiple data sources, rather than forcing you to have one product or feature per data source? And that really just doesn't make sense in the days ahead with all the signal loss and fragmentation we're seeing in the landscape? AJ Wilcox Oh, beautiful. You answered the question before I even had it. So thanks for that. We know that advertisers currently have very full marketing stacks and tech stacks. How does the revenue attribution report fit into the existing attribution tools that someone might already be using? Jae Oh Yeah, we totally understand measurement. attribution modeling is a sensitive topic and very often quite bespoke to a lot of the customers, especially the more sophisticated their stack is. But having said that, this is the first time we're having a standalone measurement solution for LinkedIn that attributes revenue to impressions, or clicks or engagement behavior. So this is our first chance to start telling the story natively. But having said that, that doesn't mean we want to be mutually exclusive, but other solutions in the market. We understand B2B is long. B2B is complicated. And so it's really top of mind for us, and how we integrate ourselves to be compatible, complementary to existing solutions in the market. So they tell us a consistent story that is worth supporting and making plans around. AJ Wilcox So I have a question that I didn't actually prep you for here. So the offline upload that we do for revenue attribution, it's based on email address, but like you mentioned, the source of the revenue attribution report that comes from the pixel. So it reasons to me that someone who maybe they have their personal email address saved in LinkedIn, and someone else who has their work email saved as their default login, it's not going to matter, like the pixel knows who that person is, once they make it into the CRM. Am I correct in this line of thinking, like, maybe the revenue attribution report should have a higher match rate than we should expect with the offline app load? Jae Oh It is very, there's a simple answer. If you have a really rich CRM data set, which is every CRO or CFOs dream or every head of sales, leadership's dream. If you have a rich data set, like we can probably do quite a bit with that, especially if it's in combination with a insight tag or any other offline identifier stream like copy, online data stream like copy. And so it's additive is maybe the simple answer. It allows us to have more signals to connect those dots, but in and of itself, it's kind of hard to say because the results will vary depending on the customer's data set. AJ Wilcox It does seem like it'd be easier for LinkedIn to match this data up because once your CRM says that you close, let's say IBM, sure, like LinkedIn has that information to know who's an IBM employee. Jae Oh Totally. So in that aspect, company level matching, yes, 100%. Like LinkedIn is a great spot for that. And in fact, but I do think when it comes to a B2B attribution product, we have more ways of matching for an account level or a deal that's worth leveraging. But we're deeply invested in to your point. AJ Wilcox Perfect. Well, I think we've covered a lot here, like how we get access to it, what requirements we have, is there anything else that you want to share with us about the RAR that revenue attribution report? Jae Oh Yeah, I think Jim's going to go into more detail next. He's far more visionary than me and will promise you things that I will have to ultimately deliver on the roadmap. But what I would say is, the key thing to take note of is we're trying to create B2B solutions for our customers, because they've been asking for that for a long time. Knowing that B2B is more focused on specific individuals, not everyone is the buyer, it's a longer look back window that we have to employ and try evaluating different attribution methods to you know, understand for your business model, which is a right one to understand where to pull the levers where to draw back. No, I think these things are really critical and how LinkedIn fills a certain role in that equation, because LinkedIn data is not available everywhere else, when you start factoring in what's working and what's not. And so, I think that reframing is the passion that is driving a lot of the innovation that you'll be seeing from this team in the coming days and weeks. But with that, I hand it over to Jim. AJ Wilcox Okay, I want to honor you for that focus on B2B. Coming from the background of Google Ads and Facebook Ads. There is no other platform that caters to B2B and there's this giant need. LinkedIn has stepped in quite nicely, so we sure appreciate your focus there. Jae, what are you most excited about right now, personally? Jae Oh You can't go anywhere right now without talking about AI and machine learning these days. And so we're also creatures of our own personal lives, I've been finding myself making parallels to how quickly my two year old son has been learning and the way that AI is continuing to evolve. And so, you know, given that it's a really exciting time for us, and we reevaluate how AI can help us to do some things better or faster or differently. It's giving me an opportunity to reflect on what's important, and to be clear about what I want to accomplish. And how I tie that to my personal life is recently I was solo parenting with my son in New York for a week, which, you know, wow, I won't do that again anytime soon. Yeah, but I leverage GAI to create an itinerary for our toddler activities and meals for the week in less than five minutes. Amazing. And like four days, several rounds of ice cream later, he was pretty happy, I was ready to put in a bed, things went really well. So in the context of like, work, like deeply understanding that role. What do we want the machine learning models to do to help us improve over time? It's not business as usual. Can we support similar independent operation or growth that we have in like young kids, but in our systems, can we make that more automated, but with the right guidance is something I'm really really excited about. Translating these specific things at work, I really want to solve our attribution measurement intelligence capabilities, like let's shed the light on the things that we need to do more of and maybe less of and so, you know, making things like the Revenue Attribution Report more actionable. Whether it's like drilling down to metrics at a campaign level from that abstracted business level view, recommending how to optimize existing and new campaigns based on the success that we're observing down funnel, like launching new insights, intelligence products to help our customers more deeply understand and connect with our audiences, is something that I truly believe will result in improved experiences for both our members and our customers and that shared value segment. AJ Wilcox Awesome. Jae, we sure appreciate your thoughts and insights here. How do you want people to interact with you? Jae Oh As you'd expect, you can definitely find me on LinkedIn. So feel free to message me to connect with me. I'd love to hear more. AJ Wilcox Perfect. Thanks so much, Jae. We appreciate having you on. Great being on. AJ Wilcox Alright, here's a quick sponsor break and then we'll dive into the rest of the interview. Speaker The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. AJ Wilcox Managing your 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. Just go to B2linked.com/apply, and we'd absolutely love the chance to get to work with you. AJ Wilcox Alright, let's jump back into the interview. Next up, we have Jim Habig, who's the VP of Marketing at LinkedIn. He's leading a team helping B2B marketers succeed. Jim, thank you so much for hopping on the podcast here as well to talk about the Revenue Attribution Report, as well as overall what we're seeing here in the current economic climate. Jim Habig Yeah, thanks, AJ, for having us. A longtime listener first time caller, as they say. Very excited to be here and talking to you and happy to go into measurement or any which direction? AJ Wilcox Awesome. Well, first off, tell us a little bit about yourself anything that I mentioned here in the intro? Jim Habig Sure. Well, like Jay, I am also in the quote unquote, toddler zone. I guess I'm passing out of it and passing into it. I have a almost five year old and a 16 month old. And so he's just nipping at the heels of Jae's kid, probably literally, actually. Sort of the thing that he's doing now. And yeah, he's just teething and climbing to perilous heights. So it's a constant struggle to make sure he's not falling from things. AJ Wilcox Awesome. Gotta get together for a playdate and watch the magic happen. Jim Habig Absolutely. AJ Wilcox Cool. Well, as you know, we just talked about the Revenue Attribution Report with Jae, I want to switch gears slightly. Tell me about the state of marketing right now. It's no secret that marketers budgets are being slashed right now. They're under scrutiny, we have to make the justification for performance, especially during these uncertain economic times. So what advice do you have for marketers as we kind of tiptoe through this cycle? Jim Habig Yeah, absolutely. It's a great question. You know, I mean, there's a reason we're here talking to you about revenue attribution report and measurement more broadly. Because I think the key to weathering you know, not just this moment, but just going forward and beyond is in this story. It's in the story that we tell even within our own organizations, and I see the key to weathering this moment. is really in investing in two key relationships. And it's with your CFO and your CRO. And as you're investing in those relationships, I recommend doing three things. And the first is, is probably going to be obvious to all of your listeners, but don't fall into the last click trap. When all your reporting to your partners in finance and other organizations is on last click, you can sort of get yourself stuck, you know, you're really just you're painting a keyhole sketch of the value that your team is actually providing. So what you do instead is my second piece of advice, which is align on just a more comprehensive methodology, with your CFO and your CRO, and really focus on speaking the same language, specifically as your finance team, because we think that's the key. And you could talk about attributable revenue, vis-à-vis Revenue Attribution Report, future cash flow, relate you know, the campaign's that you're delivering, put them in those terms of sort of what's the real enterprise value that they're driving, that's going to start to paint a fuller picture of the results that you're driving. And then you start to build a model. And then my third piece of advice here is do the same thing every time, you know, I think you need to build some expectation. One of the biggest fallacies in our business is that there's some sort of like silver bullet for measurement, you know, there's some mysterious column, if only we could light that one up or turn that one on, you know, that's going to tell the full story. And it just doesn't work that way. You know, it's a mosaic. And the key is on aligning those pieces, aligning on what those pieces are going to be, and then keeping it consistent, because measurements really about consistency over time and cultivating faith via that consistency. AJ Wilcox Perfect. What do you think B2B marketers need to do more of or do better to actually demonstrate the value of their work? Jim Habig Yeah, absolutely. So you know, one of the central theses that we have over here at LinkedIn is that B2B marketers need to be investing more heavily in upper funnel brand building activities efforts. You know, considering that only 5% of your potential audience is ever actively in market, at any given time, it becomes incredibly important that you're building those memory structures that will land you on a day one list when buyers finally do come into market when they're ready to buy, start shopping around. So that introduces a measurement challenge, because we all know, brand is a bit tougher to prove out. But it's not impossible. So one of the ways our organization on the marketing side is trying to solve this is with more econometric modeling. So we feel that in MMM, you know, granted, this is a structure that's given to us from the B2C world. And we're trying to make it work for B2B. But we're doing the best we can and we feel that this and it really changed the conversation internally. It gave us more fodder for talking about that full picture. But you know, MMMs are hard, and they sort of take a long time. And so RAR is one of our attempts to sort of democratize some of the key principles behind that and make it more accessible to a broader audience. AJ Wilcox So can you define MMM for us?  Jim Habig Oh, sure. It's a medium mix model. It comes to us from the old days of like, CPG advertising, where you got to look at a lot of channels, and you got to sort of come to a hypothesis of how they're all driving benefit for your business. AJ Wilcox Makes perfect sense. So when you're thinking about the opportunities ahead, what's LinkedIn focused on to help B2B marketers meet their current and future challenges? Jim Habig I think that one of the real frontiers in the B2B space is in helping marketing and sales teams work in concert. B2B is super unique in that we have this reliance on this relationship, really just we have reliance on relationships. You know, you can't just go into the B2B store and buy a CRM. You got to talk to people, and you got to do this delicate dance and it's across organizations. It's intra organization. That's sort of the animating force behind things like revenue attribution report is how do we just get marketing and sales working closer together talking to each other, identifying maybe when there's a disconnect and smoothing out some of the friction in that system? Because it's a system that B2B just is incredibly reliant upon. And I think there's a ton more that we could do in this space and aligning audiences and aligning messages, and just showing the benefit in both directions, getting them working, singing from the same songbook. AJ Wilcox Absolutely. I want to ask you a few questions just about your background, because it's fascinating to me. Your background like you've worked at Pinterest, YouTube, Google, where does your passion for B2B come from? Jim Habig Oh, boy. So here's the thing. I've always worked on B2B teams within broader B2C organizations. It sort of did a lot to codify how I think about focus how important it is that we actually have a set of tools that are built specifically for B2B because it's a different animal, you know. I think for too long we've been reliant on just like, MMM, that I was just talking about that. is a thing that comes to us from the B2C world. But is it calibrated for our needs? Probably not, you know, we've been making do with these good enough solutions. So I think having that sort of outsider's eye, which was honed in those B2B functions at B2C companies, is what really was the impetus for leading me to this opportunity. And now I've been here LinkedIn for well, how's my son 16 months, 15 months? Basically, that's a good little mnemonic to for remember how long I've been working here. It keeps me going and keeps me you know, super engaged, because there's just so much more to solve. We're at the earliest stages of figuring out what a B2B marketing platform should look like. AJ Wilcox Alright, so same question for you that I asked Jae, what are you most excited about personally? Jim Habig Oh, boy. So as you pointed out, AJ, both Jay and I are in a fun mode where watching these little kids grow up is very rewarding. Not unlike watching the progress of GI. It's what you call a callback. So yeah, Ian, my son is, like I said, 16 months. And he's just a ton of fun. He's like doing this sort of zombie walk around. And Eva is almost five. And this is actually her first summer break. She's in preschool. And that goes year round. And now she's taking summer off, we've got a full agenda. We've got a lot of like swimming dates, and things like that coming up. So I'm very excited just to spend some more time with her over the course of the summer. AJ Wilcox And then what are you most excited about professionally right now, Jim Habig Honestly, that there's still so much to figure out. I think the thing that really invigorates me is just the opportunity ahead, and I look around. And we talked about what, like six or seven problems here. But there are dozens more, you look anywhere. And there are other things that we're using a good enough solution. And we're still trying to make do with things received wisdom from other industries. And it's just a lot of stuff to figure out. And that's fun. We're at the early stages, and I like those heady early days on things. So it's gonna be hard, but it's hard, fun. AJ Wilcox And grainfields for sure they are ready to be harvested. Jim Habig Amen. AJ Wilcox Was there anything that you want to share with us about what you're working on or anything like that we would talk about. Jim Habig Now we're just super excited about the stuff that Jae talked about with RAR. We think this is a big step forward in terms of calibrating that measurement for the B2B world. Like I said, I think there's more we could be doing. And we're still in the early days of it, but this is one of those things where run, don't walk, go check it out for yourselves. We think it can really change the conversations that you're having with your constituents, even within your organization's so we urge you all to check it out. And please give us feedback. We're nothing if not for your feedback, your advice, your consultation. We're trying to build this stuff for all of you. So please, let's make it a two way dialogue at all times. AJ Wilcox Beautiful. Thanks for sharing. Is there a way you want people to be able to get in touch with you? Jim Habig Please reach out on LinkedIn. I'm pretty active on the platform. I know Jae is as well. And yeah, love to hear from you. Like I said, you know, we're nothing without your your feedback, your comments, and your thoughts. And tell us what other challenges you want us to try and work on solving together. AJ Wilcox Very cool. And I would recommend everyone listening, reach out to Jim, reach out to Jae on their LinkedIn profiles. Customize your invite and let them know that you're connecting because you heard them on the show that'll help them know which ones to accept and which ones are going to be spam. Awesome. Jim, thanks so much for being here. We sure appreciate all your insights. Jim Habig Thank you, AJ. AJ Wilcox All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around, and right after the resources, I'm going to share my thoughts on the Revenue Attribution Report and teach you exactly how to set it up. So don't skip to the next episode yet. Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. AJ Wilcox Alright, like we talked about in the interview, you'll see a link in the show notes below for Jae Oh's profile on LinkedIn. Make sure to connect with him, follow Him whatever. You'll also see Jim Habig's profile as well, do the same there. We've linked to the help doc all about revenue attribution report, so check that out if you're curious. It'll walk you through the process. We also mentioned episode 79. It was our recap of the be to believe event. If you haven't listened to that one, I would highly recommend go back and listen to that, especially the segment where I covered Jim Habig's presentation. Come be a founding member of the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics Community. Act fast and you'll get grandfathered into the lowest price that the community will ever be. And you can do that at fanatics.B2Linked.com. If this is your first time listening, welcome, please hit that subscribe button. But if this is not your first time listening, please do rate and review the podcast especially on Apple podcasts. It's by far the best way that you can say thank you for us coming out with this content. With any questions, suggestions or corrections, reach out to us at podcast at B2Linked.com. AJ Wilcox Alright, so here are my thoughts on Revenue Attribution Report. I know there are plenty of you marketers who have very strong opinions all about revenue attribution so don't freak out if you log into the product for the first time, and it doesn't fit your exact use case. Remember, this is just a starting point. And I'm so excited about LinkedIn jumping into this fray. As it's starting out the only CRM that it syncs to is Salesforce. But of course, I expect in the future, many more CRMs rolling out. I do see that the usefulness of the Revenue Attribution Report is really going to be dictated by the match rates. And that is the ability of LinkedIn to match up who your customers are to who they are on LinkedIn. And we don't know this yet. We don't know what match rates are going to be like. So as we learn more, we'll announce it and let you know. But between you and me, I expect them to be really good, just from understanding how the technology is working on the back end. If you want to go set this up right now, go log into business manager. In the left hand navigation, you'll see revenue attribution as its own tab, you can click on that and then you'll see the option to connect to your CRM. LinkedIn wants us to note that it can take up to 72 hours for data to appear once business manager has successfully synced with the CRM. Now this is a public beta. But in the fall when it comes out as a general release, we'll get a lot more additional features for the report. I specifically love that this is all self serve, and we don't need to go to our rep for this. Okay, there we go. We'll see you back here next week. I'm cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Pixel Helper for LinkedIn AI for writing ad copy Thomas Veraar on LinkedIn Free LinkedIn Ads Startup Guide 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 LinkedIn Learning Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover or with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review!   Show Transcript Everything you need to set up and begin optimization of a LinkedIn Ads account in one podcast episode. That's right, you best buckle up, because it's gonna be a wild ride. We're covering the complete startup checklist for LinkedIn Ads 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! Years ago, we launched the LinkedIn Ads startup checklist. At the time, it was a one pager with nine checklist items that we created for the community and we gated it. It was helpful for those that were just getting started advertising on LinkedIn, and just needed a simple resource to get moving. We've kept improving it over time and it's now become an 11 page guide with not just checklist items, but detailed instructions on how to do the things that we recommend. Plus, we went beyond the nine necessary items and scaled it up to 14 that included the non-essentials, but highly recommended steps to getting success on the LinkedIn Ads platform. This guide is currently free and totally ungated. If you go to B2Linked.com/checklist. I think there's a ton of value there and I highly recommend it. So this episode kind of acts like an audio companion to that free guide. But I'll also get to expound quite a bit here and audio in ways that it wouldn't have made sense in the guide, it would have made it too verbose. First in the news, I have a whole bunch of things that have built up over time, so we're gonna cover all of them very quickly. The first is that Thomas Veraar, who's a LinkedIn rep out of Bulgaria, you've heard me mention him on the show before. He reached out after the recruiting episode, and gave our listeners a little bit of a tip. I mentioned that job title plus geography is one of the ways that we like to target for recruiting. And he chimed in and said, especially for recruiters, he loves the fields of study targeting facet. He said that fields of study are far more aligned worldwide than job titles are. And they are pretty general. He said, job titles for the same position can differ by region, which is especially important where he's from in Europe, because regions aren't very large. He said, another reason why I like the field of study for recruiting is because fields of study are added more to LinkedIn profiles than job titles. So even if someone didn't ever update their job, they're usually going to update their field of study. Sometimes he suggests using this as an option, because sometimes people end up working in areas that they didn't study in. But lots of times it lines up and make sense. Of course, it depends on the ICP, but for example, architects, lawyers, engineers, etc, are much easier to target with fields of study. Now, I really like this idea of using fields of study. But I do think we can layer on job function on top as a way of getting the best of both worlds. So we get field of study to make sure we're getting someone who studied what it is we're looking for, but then a job function on top that tells us whether they're doing it right now. So Thomas, thank you again, for taking me up on what I always suggest, which is, let us know give us feedback on the podcast episode. And I'd love to shout you out and share your advice as well. Thomas also mentioned something that I've actually been wondering about for a long time, the concept is when we install the LinkedIn pixel, sometimes it's really complex to know whether or not it was installed properly. And we pretty much have to just wait for retargeting audiences to build or some conversion starting to come through for us to tell whether or not it was set up properly. Sometimes it's pasted right into the code of a website and you can miss some pages. Sometimes it's dropped into a Tag Manager like Google Tag Manager, which is very convenient, but then it's hard to check, because then all of that JavaScript is running at the event layer. And because I'm not a JavaScript programmer, I don't understand where it is. So I found a really cool resource. It's actually a Chrome plugin, and it's called Pixel Helper for LinkedIn. You can see the link in the show notes that will take you right there. But it's basically a Chrome plugin, but it is really basic. It's a Chrome plugin that just tells you whether or not you have the pixel installed properly on any page that you visit. It works only for LinkedIn Ads. And then if you click on it, it will tell you your partner ID that you can very easily match up with the partner ID that's in your insight tag. So it makes it super, super simple. So Thomas Veraar actually reached out and said that he has a manual way that he does this, and I followed along and tried it out and it is really cool. The pixel helper Chrome plugin is a very simple way of doing this, but I thought this was fascinating to see exactly how to do this manually without a plugin. So what he suggested is, when you get to a page that you want to check this on on your website or a client website, you press F 12, and that gets you into the developer options. Then with developer options open, you want to refresh the page on PC that's Ctrl, R or F5. I like f5. But then you go into the network tab that you see there in your developer options, then you'll see a search bar and you want to search for ads.linkedin.com. And sure enough, it's going to show you this PID, it's the same as the partner ID in your LinkedIn insight tag. And what you want to do is you want to look for a status code that starts with a number two, because in webpages, a status code that starts with two means okay, and it loaded. If it starts with anything other than that, generally, there's an error, and it's not working properly. So Thomas, thank you for both resources that you've shared today. This was fantastic. I would highly recommend that everyone out there go follow Thomas Veraar, because he is absolutely one of the great ones. Next, someone at LinkedIn in Europe released a five slide deck, all about LinkedIn Ads, summer seasonality. And what was so interesting for me to see on this was that over the summer, LinkedIn Ads costs tend to drop, which is not what I would expect to happen. I would actually expect that fewer people are at their computers, which then drives costs higher for advertisers. And I would share this deck with you except whoever it was who posted it, didn't make the deck downloadable. I also knew that this was based off of European data. And so it probably wouldn't be valid for everyone who's listening. But certainly those of you who are in Europe, you'll probably appreciate higher click through rates and lower costs throughout all of the summer. Within the last month, I also saw a pop up within campaign manager that let me know that the LinkedIn Audience Network now publishes reports showing you the pages that you appeared on, which is super cool. I think this is a huge stride for the LinkedIn Audience Network to show transparency about where our ads are being shown. And if you follow the LinkedIn Ads page on LinkedIn, on June 7, they released a pulse article. It's just a LinkedIn article that used to be called pulse. And they announced that they're rolling out right now an AI helper for writing ad copy. So many of you may already have this by the time you're hearing it. And so when you go to actually write ad copy, you can have ChatGPT 4 probably because Microsoft is a huge investor in OpenAI that runs ChatGPT. And of course, Microsoft owns LinkedIn. So we're going to benefit from some of these AI plugins. I wanted to quickly highlight a review here on the podcast, this was left by Gareth Evans. He's the Director of Demand Generation at Workiva, based out of the UK. And he said, "Great practical tips, great content with a lot of really useful practical tips that are both explained, well, and actionable." Gareth, I really appreciate you going to leave that review, it helps so much. And please you if you have not left a review yet, but you're a regular listener, please do go and leave us a review. It is by far the best way that you can say thank you for this content. And you get to join the likes the amazing Gareth Evans, who left a killer review already. Alright, with that being said, let's hit it, we're gonna get down to the comprehensive LinkedIn ads startup checklist and guide. Company Page Very first off, the first thing you want to do is make sure that you get access to your company page, because the majority of your LinkedIn Ads actually live on the company page. If you're an in house marketer, you probably want to have super admin access to your company page. But if you're an agency, most likely, you're going to ask for a lower role called sponsored content poster. It's underneath paid media admins. All of your sponsored content, which are your newsfeed ads, and your follower ads that are a dynamic ad. These are all based off of your company page. And then now these new thought leader ads that have come out, they're based off of employees who have claimed your company. So again, it's based off the company page. So someone can give you access to a LinkedIn Ads account and not give you company page access. But all that means is you can boost existing content that the company page has posted. But you can't create new ads, which is obviously lame if you want to create ads. You can actually also give company page access through LinkedIn business manager, but you don't need to, which takes us to our next step which is access to the ads account. Ads Account Now this one can be a little bit different, because if you've ever set up business manager for your ad account, you are stuck with it, you can't divorce your account from business manager. So you'll have to do everything through business manager. But if you haven't already attached your ads account to business manager, great, keep it there because I don't think business manager brings a lot of value. Whoever has admin access to the LinkedIn ads account, what they do is they go to manage access, they go to account settings in the navigation, and then click on manage access. And there they get to add you. Account manager means that you can make any changes in an account. A campaign manager means you can't add or remove people, but you can do everything else. And of course, if you don't already have an ads account or a company page, you can go set those up for free. Set Up Billing The next step, and you will not be able to forget this because there is a red nag banner on every page, as you're setting up the ad account, they will want you to set up your billing. So you have to go in and register a credit card. It's really easy, you just click on the nag banner, it will take you right to a place to enter your credit card. If you're already spending pretty healthily and you have a track record of several months at least of advertising, you can contact LinkedIn and get set up on invoicing rather than an accrual credit card spend. Now the only person who can set up billing is the billing admin on the ads account. So if you're not the billing admin, you'll see the nag banner, but you've just got to go and tell whoever is the billing admin to go and click those links. Install the Insight Tag Alright, like we talked about in the news section about the LinkedIn insight tag, this is step number four in setting up your ad account. You do want to make sure you've installed the Insight tag that does three different things for you and all three are important. Number one, it acts as your conversion tracking so anytime you want to track conversions, this insight tag or pixel is the thing that's doing it. Next, it also creates your website retargeting audiences, which is super valuable. And finally, just the presence of this tag on your website enables LinkedIn to give you what I call LinkedIn analytics. But it's a free website demographics report that shows the business makeup of anyone who comes to visit your website, even if you didn't drive them from LinkedIn Ads. It's a very cool report. And it's totally free. You don't have to spend a dime on LinkedIn Ads. To get to your LinkedIn insight tag, you click on analyze, and then insight tag, and it will let you either generate one there, or it will even send one to a web developer that you want to email it to. LinkedIn suggests pasting this in your website's global footer. And that's all fine and good, but I actually like to load it in the header because that gives me a higher chance of the tag actually firing before someone leaves the page if the page is taking too long to load. Set up conversions Alright, with the LinkedIn insight tag setup, that enables you to start setting up your conversion tracking. Now occasionally, an advertiser will come to me and say, well, we're not tracking conversions, or we won't need to for a while. But I would still set this up ahead of time, even if you're not driving people towards a conversion event yet. And this is for the simple reason of being able to track view through conversions. So set up conversion tracking for any event across your website that you might eventually want to target with a conversion, or just any conversion event that's happening on your website. And then when your other channels, let's say you're running Google search, or Facebook Ads, or SEO, if anyone there ends up converting on your website, but they've also seen your ads, you'll start to see view through conversions tally up inside your ads account. We know that a buyers journey is not linear, they touch so many different channels at so many different times and so when I see view through conversions start to increment up, I know that my cohesive multi channel strategy is working. To create your conversions, it's also under analyze, and you click conversion tracking and set up your conversion events there. I can't overstate this enough. I highly recommend when you set up conversion tracking to ensure that you have a thank you page that you get redirected to whenever anyone fills out a form. Some web developers will push back on this and they'll say it's a bad experience. It's not modern, but I will tell you it is infinitely easier to troubleshoot and set up if you have a separate page that's your thank you page. Otherwise, the web developer is going to have to troubleshoot it when an if when someone clicks on a button, it doesn't fire as a conversion. Simplify your life and make sure that you have a thank you page rather than just firing a conversion based off of someone clicking a button. Consider target audience Alright next here is consider your target audience. Because after all, the reason that we come to LinkedIn and we pay a premium for this traffic is access to this premium audience. But you don't want to waste money. So put some thought into who actually is your ideal buyer? What sorts of companies do they represent? I really like to have a combined targeting where one element is targeting who the person is professionally. And then the other element is what type of company do they represent. So for instance, if I'm going to use job title targeting, maybe I target something like Salesforce administrator, and maybe that gets me the right person. But then it's still important to understand what type of company I'm going after. So for this, I might also layer on what industry the company is in, or what size it is, or maybe even company names, if you're going to do an account based marketing approach. By putting serious thought and research into who your ideal buyer is, your targeting is going to be a lot more effective. Set up campaigns the right way Next is when you actually go to set up your campaigns, setting them up the right way. We talked about this a little bit in Episode 100. But here are the basic procedures for creating a new campaign that you absolutely need to pay attention to. First off, as you create your first campaign, it will ask you to select an objective, you can really start here with whatever makes sense, but I highly recommend website visits if you're trying to send traffic to your landing page. And lead generation if you have a gated type of asset, or you're just trying to get someone to fill out a form that isn't on the landing page. The others you can kind of test into after that. After you do the targeting portion, you'll see a little checkbox that's usually checked for you, and it's called nnable audience expansion. I highly recommend always uncheck that box. We have not yet found a case where audience expansion was actually good for an account. It's usually very, very bad. I tell people, it's the COVID-19 Delta variant of LinkedIn Ads. Next, if you choose one of the ad formats, that is in the newsfeed, LinkedIn will automatically have you in a placement called LinkedIn Audience Network. There could be some use here later on as you test into it, but I would highly recommend avoid using this when you're very first starting, it tends to generate traffic that is much lower in quality than if you were getting them right from LinkedIn. So probably stay away from that one to begin with. Next, as you keep scrolling down the page, you'll get to the bidding and budgeting section. And this one is really important. The default bidding method that LinkedIn sticks you on is called maximum delivery. And it is the most expensive way to pay for LinkedIn traffic 90% of the time, the option that you want to start out with is manual bidding, and it's hidden, you have to click on show additional options, then click on manual CPC bidding. And this is going to allow you to set a bid and say LinkedIn, I'm not going to pay more than this amount anytime someone clicks on my ad. And LinkedIn is going to give you a crazy range that it recommends, it might say something like your competitors are bidding between $20 and $70. For this traffic. If you're just getting started and you have a low budget, don't listen to those at all, you can bid significantly lower than what LinkedIn is recommending, because the worst thing that can happen to you, if you bid too low, is you just won't get traffic and impressions. And you have to come in the next day and maybe incrementally increase your bid a little bit until it does start spending. If you do leave it on maximum delivery, you'll likely end up paying, depending on how well your ads perform, somewhere between about $20 to $50 per click, which is insane. You really shouldn't have to pay more than like 10 bucks a click, and that speaking specifically for targeting the US. Other areas of the world are significantly cheaper. And then finally, at the end of your campaign creation process, there will be an option to add a conversion to that campaign. And there's just no downside that I've found to attaching every possible conversion to every possible campaign. So don't get stuck here. Don't feel like you're out of your depth here. All right, here's a quick sponsor break and then we'll dive right back into considering your offer. 19:27 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 it? 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 in house agency or digital ads hire can. Plus, we're official LinkedIn partners. Just navigate on over to B2Linked.com/apply and we'd absolutely love the chance to chat with you about your campaigns. Consider your offer Alright, let's jump back into your offer. So before you start running your ads, you really need to understand what it is that you're offering your audience in exchange for their attention. 95% of the time, a cold audience, which means someone who's never heard of you before, they're not willing to convert on something like a demo request, or talk to sales or buy something until they've been warmed up. So as part of this warming, we highly recommend launching an offer that teaches your audience something new, solves a major pain point, helps them do their jobs better in some way. We'd recommend doing this through ungated assets and content. Things that really have next to no friction, and just provide a lot of benefit. Free assets like ebooks, webinars, podcasts, online communities, etc. These all provide a ton of value and we'll get people really appreciating you and keeping you top of mind. Craft your message Next, once you understand what it is you're offering someone, the obvious next step is to start writing and crafting your message of what they're going to get out of it. You obviously want to identify what sort of struggles your audience has an offer significant solutions to those problems. And don't be afraid to issue a strong and clear call to action. And we highly recommend running two ads per campaign so that you can AB test and learn over time what people prefer, versus what they don't prefer. Gather imagery for your ads After you've crafted your message, the next step is to get imagery, visuals for your ads. And this is so important to tell you, your imagery is not meant to convert. So often I see advertisers who try to cram way too much into their image. They think, oh, this is what's getting their attention, so I have to jam a whole bunch of explanatory text in here. Oh, and I gotta get my logo and a button and a subtitle and their image just ends up looking so cluttered. Instead, I would highly recommend that your imagery follows the billboard rule. If you've ever bought billboard media, billboard companies will tell you don't put more than seven words on your billboard, because that's about what people can get just at a glance as they're driving without having to take their eyes off of the road. The same thing goes for LinkedIn Ads, keep your imagery very simple, because its whole job is just to get people to stop scrolling. We call this a thumb stopper. Your ad copy is going to do the converting and the convincing and the solving problems, but your imagery, its whole job is just to get someone's attention so that they'll read your ad copy. Now because LinkedIn is color palette is very blues, grays and whites, you want your imagery to really stand out. So if you look at a color wheel, this is what designers use, opposite of blue is orange. So it's helpful to include pops of orange, reds, greens, purples, anything that's going to help stand out against that blue and get attention. We find that imagery on LinkedIn that is square tends to perform much better than about any other dimensions. So in sponsored content, if you're going to do like a single image ad, we'd recommend 1200 by 1200 square. Launch your ads So now as a recap, you've created the account or you've gotten access to it, you have access to the company page, you've set up the insight tag and conversion tracking so you're all ready to go there. Now you've identified your audience, decided on an offer, and now you've crafted messaging and imagery to help support that. You are ready to launch your ads. LinkedIn makes it really easy as you're going through the campaign creation process to put you right on the spot where you can start actually creating the ads and then launch them so you won't need any extra help for me on this. That being said, I'm going to walk you through the next few steps that like I mentioned at the beginning are optional, but highly recommended. Plan a holistic LinkedIn Ads strategy full funnel Point number 12 here is called plan a holistic LinkedIn Ads strategy. And like we've already talked about, if this is someone's first time hearing about your company, it's highly unlikely that they want to buy your high ticket product or service just after seeing one or maybe two ads from you. So you'll need to plan this holistic strategy and make sure that you're providing value all along the way and walking this cold traffic through your sales process until they become warm, and eventually hot leads for you. What this means is you'll want to specifically think about the kinds of offers that are useful to someone who doesn't yet know you, like you, or trust you yet. I really like video content for helping people get to know me and like me, because it's totally possible for someone to read like five of my guides, but still not feel like they know me like me or trust me. Whereas if you watch a two minute video of me talking and sharing something of value, maybe you're already knowing me, liking me, and trusting me just from that. The same thing is gonna go for your audience. I also really like subscribable content as a way of getting people to know me, like me, and trust me, because it takes the same amount of work to get you to go and listen to a podcast and subscribe to it as it does to get you to go and download a guide. Well, the guide is a one hit. Once you're done reading the guide, you're kind of done with me. But if you come and listen to this podcast, you're now hearing me in your ears every week. And it sounds strange, but it builds a relationship with your prospect to where by the time they reach out to you, they feel like they already know you, you have a friendship. So content like newsletters, like weekly live streams, podcasts, a YouTube channel, all of these are subscribable and get you multiple shots on goal with your prospect getting to know you. Create matched audiences But of course, when you get someone introduced to your brand, now you need to follow up. And this is something called retargeting. On LinkedIn, we create retargeting through something that LinkedIn calls matched audiences. Inside your LinkedIn Ads account, if you go to plan in your navigation, and then go to audiences, then you can click create audience and LinkedIn will show you the bevy of options of all the different kinds of retargeting audiences that it can create. So think of it this way, your very first set of ads where you're just being helpful, and getting people to know you and hear of you, that's your audience have cold traffic, and then based off of them taking action on whatever your ads are asking them to do, you can graduate them to the next level of retargeting, and there's no limit to the number of layers that you can push people through. But just realize that every retargeting audience needs at least 300 people, even to serve. So I would recommend right at first, create more of like a two or a three step funnel, where they interact with your cold ads, and then you graduate them to a warm, and then graduate them to a hot. And the way that graduation works, when you create a retargeting audience, you can then exclude that retargeting audience from your original cold audience. And that makes it so once someone interacts with that level of ads, let's say your cold ads,, they now get removed from that audience and now they only qualify to be shown your ads at the, let's say, middle of funnel level. And this is how you create sequences. It's how you can walk people from the top of the funnel down to the bottom of the funnel, and to create a demand generating machine. Optimize and scale My very last tip here is optimizing and scaling because once your ads are live, you never know what your audience is going to like or what they're not going to like until you've actually tested it. So you've launched these ads, and you watch the progress as it happens. If something's not working, you can pause it, you can shut it off, or you can even bid it down so you're making LinkedIn less incentivized to show that. And the things that are working well, you can bid them up and give them more budget and do more of those things. Really, at this point, the world is your oyster, and you're about to learn a lot about who your audience is and what they like, while at the same time you're generating leads. It's a beautiful thing. And it does take work and it does take attention. And quite honestly, that's why we have a job here at B2Linked because we do all this for you. When you're just barely getting started on an ad channel, there are so many moving parts. And quite honestly, that learning phase is so expensive. Working with someone like us who have already mastered that learning curve, we can get you right to an optimized campaign of LinkedIn Ads. Who knows it could be up your alley. If you're in that situation, reach out to us at B2Linked.com/apply. Alright, 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. Like we mentioned in the news section, there's a link to the Pixel Helper Chrome extension that will help you understand whether your LinkedIn insight tag is installed properly or not. You'll also see a link to the pulse article from LinkedIn Ads where they introduced the new AI tool for helping you write ad copy, which I think is really cool. I do highly recommend that you go and download this checklist and guide that we went over today because then you don't have to listen to me and hit pause and then rewind, just in case you missed something. You'll have the whole checklist ready to go. And like we just announced on Episode 100, we just recently launched the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics Community, where you get access to our four courses that take you from absolute beginner to expert level LinkedIn Ads professional. And if you're listening to this within the first month, chances are you still have access to the founding members discount. You get grandfathered into the very lowest rate that this will ever be at either $59 a month for access to the community and courses, or $259 a month to be part of the super fanatics where you get to hop on a weekly call with me. If this is your first time listening, hit that subscribe button so you keep hearing content like this in the future. But if this is not your first episode, please do go and rate and review the podcast especially on Apple podcasts. It is by far the best way that you can say thank you for us constantly coming out with this great content every week, if I don't say so myself. With any questions, suggestions, or corrections on what we've talked about, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. I'm cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: April Dunford on LinkedIn Conversation Ad Changes 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 LinkedIn Learning Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover or with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review!   Show Transcript AJ Wilcox We ran LinkedIn Video Ads under three different objectives and compare the results, we show you exactly how to get the best performance for your video ads on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Speaker Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. AJ Wilcox Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics, I've got a guest for you that I'm super excited about today. It's Eric Jones, who is B2linked head of marketing. He brought the results of a killer AB test to me and I just had to have him on as a guest to share with you the results. Eric is one of my favorite people on the planet. You'll appreciate the depth that he thinks about LinkedIn ads in his responses, I know you will. First in the news. When I logged into the platform today, I saw a pop up announcement that says, "We've added new metrics". While we make improvements on conversation ads, we'll start tracking and reporting on headline impressions and headline CTR. And then you can click learn more. So I did. As I clicked this, it took me to a help article, all about the new conversation ad format. And I was actually really shocked to see this because I knew at some point that conversation ads are going to become conversation starter ads. But this seems like an evolution even before that. So there's this table in the bottom that shows you the difference between legacy conversation ads, and the new and improved ones. And what really caught my attention, were a couple of the things. First is in frequency caps, you probably already know that legacy conversation ads, they've only been sent to a LinkedIn member once every 30 days. So once you've sent one, your competitor can't send one for 30 days. But in the new and improved one, it says it will generate up to three impressions every seven days. So this is really interesting to me. Now our conversation ads are going to have more impressions rather than just that initial one. Now, you probably already know that the only way to pay for conversation ads before was on a cost per send. And that was usually anywhere between about 50 cents to $1 per send if you were sending in North America. But the new and improved conversation ads have a cost per click price. It says advertisers pay only for the initial click that opens the message. The last call out I'll mention here is that with the legacy conversation ads, it was right at the top of either the focused or the unfocused version of your inbox. But in the new and improved version, it opens in the focus tab. And if someone clicks on the ad and then clicks on a call to action button, the ad will stay in the focus tab. But if they click to open the ad, but don't engage with any of the calls to action, then it automatically gets moved to the other the unfocused inbox. So this actually sounds really cool. And now that I'm reading through this, this really could become conversation starter ads. So maybe that's what this is. They're just not putting a name to it yet. But everything I'm reading so far, I'm a fan of. I wanted to highlight one review here from Apple podcasts, the user FancyNancyPansty, which is the greatest username in the whole world. Nancy, reach out to me, let me know that this is your review. I'd love to tell you how impressive that name is. But she says, "Makes me better at my job five stars. It's pretty nerdy to look forward to a podcast about paid media buying, but I do. Really great actionable content here. Fun and lighthearted and not dry. Give it a listen." Nancy, I really appreciate that review. I try really hard not to make this dry. Alright, without further ado, let's jump right into the interview. AJ Wilcox I'm so excited to have Eric Jones on the podcast for the first time. Eric is very much what I would consider my partner in crime. I'll give you kind of his background here. He's been in digital marketing for six plus years now, plenty of experience, obviously with LinkedIn, but also with Google and Facebook. He's managed ad campaigns in many different industries, many of which were also B2B, SaaS, healthcare, finance, entertainment, and more. He's currently our Director of Content Marketing here at B2Linked. Eric, welcome to the show. Eric Jones AJ, I'm so stoked to be here. Thank you so much for having me. AJ Wilcox Absolutely. Eric, is the reason that we put these podcast episodes together so efficiently. He works together with me on almost every single one. So having him actually be interviewed on the show is a big deal because he's been behind the scenes so much. So I'm excited to actually have people hearing from you. Eric Jones And honestly, that means a lot. Thanks, AJ. I appreciate that call out. AJ Wilcox Of course. All right. So obviously I give you a little bit of intro tell us anything personal or otherwise that I didn't cover in the intro. Eric Jones I think you pretty much covered it. I'm a digital marketing nerd at heart with a passion for advertising and content strategy. That's my profession by day, I would say if I were to add anything more, I do have some side projects that I'm working on, including a graphic novel and some tabletop games. So super fun stuff, just things that I enjoy doing in my spare time. AJ Wilcox And I'll tell you, the graphic novel was one of the main reasons that I wanted to hire you originally. How long have you been here? Eric Jones It's been about three and a half years now, AJ Wilcox Three and a half years. So three and a half years ago, as I was interviewing you, I was like, Whoa, if he's willing to work on a graphic novel on the side, like that shows an intense dedication to craft, it shows interest in writing, interest in visuals, these are all very, very important to advertising, obviously. And it has not led me down. You have not let me down, Thank you! Eric Jones That's good. That's really good. But I lived up to the expectation at least. It's actually really funny because I did start my graphic novel, but it's really been pushed to the backburner, especially because I think my tabletop games have have kind of taken off a lot faster than the graphic novel. So I've been investing a lot more time into that lately. And I mean, I've got like three that I'm working on all at once. It's a little chaotic, but it's been a really, really cool learning experience. Like I said, it started out as a passion project. But I would be thrilled if I could sell them in the future. I think that'd be really cool. So that is my eventual goal. But as of now, it's just been a really fun passion project. And I'm excited to see where it goes. AJ Wilcox And this is all totally new to me to this. This is great to hear. The reason we're bringing you on here for this episode is because you just recently ran our super cool AB test. I'd actually probably categorize it as a an ABC test. And I was so excited to share the results of this with the audience. Who else better than the person who ran the test to tell us all about it. So you've been running this really cool test for about the last month. Can you give us the setup? Tell us about what led you to want to start the test, how it was set up, and all that? Eric Jones Yeah, absolutely. So the whole test really revolves around the video ad format. It's arguably the ad format that we've had the least experience with as a company. And that's not to say that we don't believe in video, it's just that we've always held this belief that video content is expensive, and time consuming to produce. And I think a lot of businesses feel that way. I mean, as we've worked with clients in the past who have wanted to run video, that seems to be a consistent concern that they share with us is it's difficult in general to create. And so we've we tend to steer clear video. But we've recently come to the realization that video doesn't have to be expensive or time consuming to produce. Video can be raw, it can be concise, it doesn't have to be overly produced to be effective. And personally, I think it's more authentic that way. So we've been testing more short form video content as a company. And because of that, because we haven't, like used this ad format, much in the past, I did want to know what was the most efficient way to run video. So that essentially led me to testing this in the first place. AJ Wilcox I love it. Okay, so here's the test, it was running exactly the same video ads across three different objectives. Because many don't know, you can run video under a website visits objective, which is kind of interesting. I think most know you can run it under a video views campaign, that's in the name. So we have three different objectives we can run it under. And I think you got tipped off by one of the members of our team that there was a certain objective that worked really well for video. Tell us about that. Eric Jones Yeah, so one of our team members, we were just talking about video ads and talking about the initiatives that we wanted to run for our next paid ad campaign. And he talked about the experience that he was having with running his own video ads, because he was running video ads at the time for a client. He was saying that under the engagement objective, he was seeing more cost efficiency then, when he was running the website visits objective. And I thought that was super interesting. So that was really where this whole test started off was. I thought okay, well, this is a great hypothesis. So based off of this information, if we go into this thinking that the engagement objective is going to be more cost efficient than the website visits objective. Well, that's a great thing that we can measure against, right. That's a great hypothesis we can test. And so when we went into this whole test, the way we set it up was like you mentioned we chose between three objectives. So obviously engagement in website visits because that tied into that hypothesis, but I also wanted to test video views, because like you mentioned before it's in the name, it made sense to test video views alongside these other two. So what I did was I left all else the same. Audience targeting, campaign structure, ads. The only thing I changed was this one variable and that was the objective. And I tried to keep bidding the same across them all as well. I bid manually for clicks in both the website visits and the engagement campaigns, and then I bid manually for video views in the video views campaign, since LinkedIn doesn't allow you to bid for clicks under this objective. So I tested each of those objectives at separate times, because LinkedIn also doesn't allow for ads with differing objectives to be in a single campaign. And I ran each objective for about seven to 10 days, and then monitored and compare the results from week to week. AJ Wilcox And what order did you do it in? Did you do engagement, then web site visits, then video views? Eric Jones Yeah, yeah, that's exactly the setup. So yeah, engagement first. Wanted to launch with that one, just to test that hypothesis with that anonymous tip that we got from our employee. And then following was website visits and video views. AJ Wilcox Alright, so when you went to go set your bid for video views? How did you set a bid there? Because that was the one where bidding is going to be different? Did you look at the effective cost per view on the other objectives, and then try to set around there? Or did you just set somewhere in Lincoln's range? Eric Jones Great question. So with the first two, I should say, so for engagement and website visits, we typically like to bid low. So what I did actually was I compared to LinkedIn bidding recommendations, but I tried to bid as close to the lower end of those ranges as I possibly could. For website visits, I may have been a little bit lower. Just because historically, in the past, we've been able to spend our full budgets and get even more cost efficiency by bidding lower than LinkedIn is recommended bidding range. So for website visits, I may have been a little bit lower. But for engagement and video views I did use LinkedIn's recommended range as a benchmark, and I bid on the lower end of that range, just to start off with. Excellent, that's super helpful context. And I should note, so about the videos themselves, the video ads, what they were was they were essentially stories. So we wanted to introduce our audience to be to B2Linked's why. If you're familiar with Simon Cynics start with why. That was kind of the inspiration, we wanted to tell more of a story revolving around the origin of the company, its mission, its values, our intent with these videos was to communicate to our audience like these stories in a relatable way. And in a way that established an emotional connection between us and our audience. AJ Wilcox Oh, I love it. Perfect setup. So with these videos, they're essentially telling a story. So what we wanted was for people to watch the story. When I say the word objective, we don't know if it's the marketers objective, or if it's the objective that someone selected inside of LinkedIn. So we're saying our objective as marketers was, we wanted people to watch the videos. And if someone clicked to the web page, which is the homepage afterwards, that's great. It's a nice little bonus. But that wasn't necessarily what we altra cared about, right? Eric Jones Yeah. You nailed it. AJ Wilcox Okay, soyou've told us all about how the test gets rolled out. This is great. The planning is all super sound, in my opinion. Now, can you share with us the results? What did you actually see from all three of these objectives? How are they different? Eric Jones Yeah, so this was definitely super interesting to compare the results. So there were really a lot of different metrics that we looked at. But the core metrics that we wanted to analyze were our cost per click, our cost per view at 50%, and what that means is essentially, like, you can track what percentage of the video people watch. And so we wanted to see people who at least watched half of our video content. We consider that to be high intent. So anything beyond 50%, we wanted to measure from a cost standpoint. And then the last metric that we measured was completion rate. So starting with our CPC, we noticed that engagement and website visits were both roughly around $20. Website visits was about $20. And then engagement was just a couple dollars more, so really close. But then video views was double that. So we were around $40 for CPC. So from a cost standpoint for clicks video views was really expensive. So that's the interesting thing is when we look at cost per view, engagement was about $5. It was $4.75 and then web visits was higher than that. So it was more expensive to get views at 50% under website visits than an engagement. We were sitting around $7 for website visits. But then video views, under the video views objective, we were getting views at 50%, around $3. So even though it was the most expensive for clicks, it was the cheapest for video views, which totally makes sense. Again, it's in the name, that is the thing that LinkedIn is going to be optimizing towards. From a completion rate standpoint, it was pretty much the same. Video views, we have the highest completion rates, and then website visits, we had the lowest completion rate, and then engagement sat somewhere in between them both. AJ Wilcox It's so interesting to me to see under the website visits objective, the completion rate was a third of that of video views objective. So if you're only looking at your cost per website visit, you're thinking like, oh, website visits is looking pretty good. And then when you start looking at your cost per completion, your cost per 50% view, all of a sudden, it's astronomical compared to video views. This was great for me to understand and see. Because, you know, for the longest time, I've talked about how LinkedIn is objectives, they don't have nearly as much data to work with and optimize because people don't use LinkedIn nearly as often as people use Meta. So when Facebook says, Yes, we can optimize towards those who are more likely to watch video content, I say, absolutely. I trust it. With LinkedIn, though, LinkedIn hasn't had video for very long, they haven't had conversion tracking for nearly as long. So when we start looking at their objectives, I kind of tend to count them out. But this study actually proves me dead wrong. Eric Jones Yeah, absolutely. And you and I have talked about that too, in the past. And so I think that was probably one of the most surprising results from this test was just seeing how well LinkedIn did optimize towards its given objectives. It was really cool to see that kind of unfold over the past few weeks. And in AJ Wilcox the data, it's very clear that when we bid for video views, we got cheaper video views, when we bid for website visits, we got cheaper website visits, we bid for engagement, it was like right down the middle, which I think makes sense. A website visit and a view of video are both types of engagement. So when you tell it to like, take any kind of engagement into account, it's probably gonna do a little mix of both of those. Let me ask you this. Why do you think this was the case? Why do you think we saw the results that we saw? Eric Jones I think youyou already kind of hit on it. I mean, LinkedIn is optimizing towards what they're claiming to optimize towards video views is obviously optimizing towards getting more video views, web visits, is optimizing towards getting more website visits, and engagement, is really optimizing towards getting any sort of click or interaction with your ad as possible. So that includes likes, comments, shares, and clicks to your landing page, and more. So I think that's why we saw the results we did. But the one head scratcher for me was really looking at cost per click between website visits and engagement. Because I looked at that, and I thought, well, there's really not much different here. Like there's not enough statistical significance. What visits was just slightly cheaper than engagement, but it was like a $2 difference, right? Like, we're not talking about a huge, huge difference. Not like web visits to video views, where video views was double the cost in cost per clicks compared to website visits. It was super comparable between web visits and engagement. It kind of made me think like, why is that? But also the added context of engagement is getting a similar cost per click as website visits, but a cheaper cost per view at 50%. And so I looked at that, and I think the reasoning for that is, engagement is almost operating like a website visits campaign in this instance. I mean, the two objectives in general are very similar. They're optimizing towards clicks, even though engagement is really optimizing towards any sort of click. In general, it's very broad website visits is only optimizing towards clicks that are driving traffic to your website. But but they're really similar in those regards. They're optimizing for clicks. But my biggest question was, where are we getting cheaper video views under engagement and cost per click is staying the same? Well, I think it's likely due to the fact that those who engage more with ads are also willing to watch video content for longer periods of time, if that makes sense. So if your audience is engaging with your ad, they're liking, they're commenting, they're sharing, it's likely that those people are also going to stick around and watch your video for longer than those that LinkedIn is optimizing for under the website visits objective, which is literally just sending traffic to your website. AJ Wilcox And that actually makes perfect sense to me. Because if engagement objective is optimizing towards the kinds of people who are going to generally interact with an ad, some are going to click on the landing page and leave. And so they're going to stop watching the video at that point. Some are gonna like and comment. These are types of actions that you can do while the video is still playing. So it makes sense website visit, as soon as someone clicks, you get charged, but the video stops. And so there is going to be this teeter totter effect of website visits, you get more visits, but less viewing? I think it actually makes sense that way. Eric Jones Yeah, absolutely. You nailed it. AJ Wilcox Perfect. So if we as advertisers, if we're going to take something away from this, what did we actually learn from this? If I'm gonna go and start running video campaigns in the future? Can you tell me like, are there certain objectives that I should stick to or stay away from? Eric Jones Yeah, so based on the results, I would say that website visits is probably the weakest of the three. You have a higher cost per view at 50%, a lower completion rate, and CPC is on par with the engagement objective, even though we talked about it's slightly lower, it's really only a couple dollars cheaper in the test that we ran. So not enough difference there for me to want to run website visits over engagement objective, especially when you consider the much lower cost per view at 50% that you get under the engagement objective when compared to website visits. So we're talking about a similar CPC, between website visits and engagement, and a lower cost per view at 50% for the engagement objective compared to website visits. Engagement feels like the better option between the two. And in general, when you compare all three, engagement seems to be a healthy balance of both clicks and views. You're getting a comparable CPC to website visits, decent click volume and getting a good CPV at 50%. as well. Video views on the other hand, even though it has the worst click volume and CPC of the three, it's drastically outpacing website visits and engagement on the cost per view at 50% front. And even it has the highest completion rate of the three, which, again, to me shows really high intent. So the biggest takeaway for me is this if your goal is to get as many people to consume your video content and completion as possible, then video views is going to be your best option. But if your goal is to get a healthy mix of both website traffic and video views, then go with engagement. And probably just avoid website visits altogether. But that said, I mean, these are results that I saw from my own test, someone else's experience could be totally different. So I would encourage anyone listening to this episode, really to test this for themselves, and find what works for their accounts. But feel free to use this data as a guideline if you're wanting to get video ads going quickly. AJ Wilcox What and there are very different kinds of video ads. So I think depends on the setup of the ad. These ones were very much like we talked about, they were telling a story, we were more interested in people watching them and consuming them than if they clicked. But let's say a different scenario. Maybe someone has a video ad, but the video is what I would call a decoration. Like maybe it's a boomerang video, that's five seconds that repeats over and over just something to grab their attention. But your actual goal is to get people to click on your call to action. Maybe in that case, website visits would be a better objective. But I think it just comes down to what is the actual result you want. And knowing that LinkedIn is objectives actually can get you what they say they're optimizing towards. Eric Jones And that's a really good point. I think if our video content had been a little different, like where you said, our main focus was really just getting people to watch the video. If we have made more of an emphasis in our content to hey, click to the landing page, click to the website learn more about us at B2Linked.com. Like if we had made that more of the emphasis of the content, I think our audience would have behaved a lot more differently than where we were with our current test where we were really just focusing on getting people to watch through the entire video. AJ Wilcox Perfect! Eric Jones So I'll say one more cool takeaway, in addition to what I talked about before was when you take a closer look at cost per completion, which this wasn't a metric that we talked about earlier. But as advertisers we consider a click, right, we consider a click to be a signal of intent. Someone has at least an ounce of interest in what we're promoting that they're willing to click on our ads and be driven to wherever we're sending them to. I consider a video completion to represent the same thing. So just to give you some some further metrics, cost per completion was also a lot lower for the video views objective in comparison to the other two, we were sitting around, just under $5 for cost per completion. For engagement, it again set in the middle around $8. And cost per completion for website visits was under $16. Eric Jones Wow. Drastic. Eric Jones It was a lot higher. Yeah. But when you compare these costs to an average cost per click on LinkedIn, especially the video views, one, I mean, it's about four times cheaper for us to get a video completion than it is to drive someone to our website. Eric Jones Wow. Eric Jones And that's not to say that these two things are an apples to apples comparison, right. But if we're just considering level of intent, like I say, that's a pretty significant difference. And you consider also like how long it can take to build audiences to retarget and nurture further, where LinkedIn requires an audience size of at least 300 people that the platform recognizes in its user base in order to create a campaign. I mean, retargeting audiences can take months to create if you're building them based off of leads or website traffic. But retargeting audiences can be built in a matter of days using LinkedIn, video views, retargeting, even if it's an audience full of those who watched your content all the way through, which again, I think is pretty significant. AJ Wilcox That's absolutely huge, great call out there. Here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive right back into the interview. Speaker The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linkedcom, the LinkedIn Ads experts. AJ Wilcox 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. Just go to B2Linked.com/apply to fill out the form, and we'd absolutely love the chance to get to work with you. AJ Wilcox Alright, let's jump back into the interview with Eric Jones. AJ Wilcox So we've learned some great things here. I'm sure you're looking at this already devising your next test. What's the next thing you want to test? What's the next thing you want to learn based off of the data you already have here? Eric Jones Great, great question. So my test revolved mainly around bidding manually for all of these objectives. So like, if I were to further this test, I think it would make sense to continue to test efficiency and how it's affected when bidding by impressions, or even running the brand awareness objective, which only allows you to bid for impressions or reach. I think that makes the most logical sense to go next. AJ Wilcox I love it. Alright, so we can try bidding aggressively, we can try changing bid type, there is one more objective that we can try. So lots of different options here. And I hope I mean, just given the initial start, we've already learned, like which objective seems like the better bet. It seems like just testing, aggressive bids, very low bids, somewhere in between, we're going to learn something. But I think the majority of the learnings here, we've presented pretty well. Eric Jones Yeah, for sure. And I mean, you could also test like we hinted to earlier, I mean, you could test different types of video creative or different calls to action within your content, to see also how your audience might behavior or respond differently based off of, you know, what is actually being promoted or presented in your video content. So there's really a lot of different ways we can take this, but all I would say are great ideas. AJ Wilcox Well, I think that'swhy we're presenting this now and not three years ago is because video ads are just really complex. With everything dealing with click like single image, it was really easy to test different elements. But it's so hard to stick a pin in something in video and categorize it. Because there's so many different ways of communicating emotion and a product and a service all in video. So to just put everything into a category and say, This is how video works extremely hard. So that's why it's taken us this long to present it. But it also makes it really hard to analyze too, because video is just so intimidating. So please let us know how future tests go. And I'm excited to get the learnings from it. Eric Jones Yeah, we'll do. AJ Wilcox Alright, so next one, is there anything that LinkedIn is working on right now that you're excited about that maybe could influence or help with these tests? Eric Jones Yeah, you know, I'm really excited for thought leader ads. I know they were just barely released and masked to advertisers this past week. The thing that crushes my soul, though is that it's limited to single image ads. So if you have content that promotes or utilizes video or utilizes an in feed document, like you can't use any of that content, like you can't boost it, it's not even available under the thought leader ad format to be able to put money behind. So that's super depressing to me that I can't boost a video ad. AJ Wilcox Hopefully LinkedIn fixes that in the future, maybe they release different kinds of personal posts that can be boosted. That would be cool. Eric Jones That's my hope, too. I think releasing the feature and limiting it to single image ads, I think makes sense. But I do, I hope they make updates in the future. So I know that's not directly related to video ads, particularly. I hope we can do like video thought leader ads in the future. But as far as anything else that LinkedIn is working on, I'll be honest, I'm not super excited about anything else related to video. I have heard that in stream video ads on LAN, LinkedIn's Audience Network, are coming. But I'm not super, super excited about those for a couple of reasons, right? Because every time I've tried the LinkedIn Audience Network, I've never gotten great results. I've always seen really inflated click through rates and seemingly low quality of website traffic that comes from land. So I'm not thrilled about the idea of more stuff coming out on LinkedIn that is related to LAN just because I've never had a positive experience with it. But to add, most in stream video ads that I've seen, have been more of a turn off than anything. So just the combination of those two things. The fact that it's in stream videos, and it's on LAN, really doesn't get me too excited. So I'm not very, very thrilled about that. But I am hopeful that video thought leader ads can come to us in the future. That's what I have to say on that. Eric Jones Amen to that. I think video representing the company page is definitely going to be not as exciting as video that represents a human. II think people are going to interact with it a lot more. I am so excited that you know, as of the time of recording, thought leader ads have just barely been released to all accounts. So I'm with absolutely thrilled. So professionally right now, what are you most excited about? Eric Jones Professionally, I would say I recently discovered April Dunford. If you've heard of her, she's a thought leader on positioning. And I've essentially subscribe to her content. She's written a book. And she's coming out with a sequel here soon, which is exciting. But all of her content on LinkedIn is great. She also just released a podcast, which is awesome. Like just so much value that she brings to the table on the topic of positioning. And so I'm kind of just kicking myself that I wish I had discovered her sooner because their insights on the topic are just so helpful. And so mind blowing to in just a way that I've never heard from anyone else who talks about positioning. So April Dunford, she's awesome. If you guys aren't familiar with her, I would encourage you to check her out to look her up on LinkedIn, Google her and her book. But I mean, in addition to that, I mentioned before that I'm making a lot of tabletop games in my spare time. And I'm working on a few all at once. But there is one in particular that I'm deeper in the playtesting phase. And that's been really exciting. I know it has nothing to do with LinkedIn ads. But it is just exciting to kind of see this project, like come so far after investing so much time. So that is also just something kind of a combination of professional and personal that I'm excited about. AJ Wilcox Amazing. I love it. Well, thanks so much for sharing your insights on such a cool test. This definitely won't be the last time we have you on the show. We'll have you back to share either a different insight or deeper into video ad testing. Eric, thank you so much for joining us. Eric Jones Yeah, thank you so much, AJ, for having me. This was a real treat. And a real pleasure. Thank you. AJ Wilcox Alright, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around. Speaker Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. AJ Wilcox Alright, Eric mentioned April Dunford, who was big on positioning and we've linked to her LinkedIn profile so you can go follow her. She's awesome. We also have a link to the help article where LinkedIn is talking about the new conversation ad format. That's well worth a look. Also, just in case you missed it last week on episode 100. We announced the official LinkedIn ads fanatics community that you can be a part of. Go check it out at fanatics. B2Linked.com. And if you sign up within the next month, you can be one of our founding members and be grandfathered into the lowest pricing ever. The community has our four courses that take you all the way from the very beginner stages of LinkedIn Ads all the way through 1% expert. Plus, there's an upgraded tier that we're calling the super fanatics and for an extra $200 a month on your subscription, you get access to weekly group coaching calls with me and the B2Linked team. If this is your first time listening, please hit that subscribe button. But if you're a regular listener, please do do us the honor of leaving a review on Apple podcasts. And I'd love to shout you out live. With any questions, suggestions, or corrections on the show, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. I'm cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Campaign Setup Bidding/Budgeting Audience Segmentation Offers that Drive Conversion LinkedIn Insight Tag Conversion Tracking Retargeting LinkedIn Ads Performance Benchmarks Excel Reporting Playlist AB Testing B2Linked's Blog Follow AJ on LinkedIn B2Linked's Youtube Channel Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics Community and Get Access to Our Beginner-Expert Courses LinkedIn Learning Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review!   Show Transcript Are you a LinkedIn Ads 1%er? I'm going to show you exactly what it takes to close the gap and become a LinkedIn Ads expert on this week's episode, the 100th episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! I'm so excited to tell you that this is the 100th episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. You longtime listeners, thank you for sticking around and spending so much time with me. It's absolutely an honor to know that I get to join you when you're commuting, exercising, walking your dog, washing your dog, exercising your dog, anything you choose to do while listening to podcasts. If you're new to the show, thank you forgiving me your ear as well. My mission with everything B2Linked does is to empower 20,000 companies advertising on LinkedIn to give them the best tips, tricks, strategies to get lower costs, better scale, and higher performance. And you are all part of this mission. Now I know many of you are already advanced advertisers. Some of you are primed and ready to go from zero to LinkedIn Ads hero. No matter where your starting point, this episode is what you'll need to get you into the top 1%. In researching for this episode, we went back over the last three years, and we hand picked the topics that we're going to be the most valuable to you. Of course, we would invite you to go back and listen to each of these episodes individually if you want to deep dive. But I'm going to touch on the top principles and topics that will really help you get the most traction. In the news, I have an announcement that I'm absolutely bursting at the seams to tell you. Because you are loyal listeners of the LinkedIn Ads Show, I wanted to give you an exclusive benefit here. For years I've been asked to put out courses. I've even partnered with LinkedIn Learning, and a couple others to create training content, but we never had our own. Candidly, this was 100% my fault that we didn't put these courses out. It felt to me like an absolutely insurmountable task to build courses that I was proud of. And then to keep them updated over time, and to promote them along the way. I've talked to many course creators in my close network just to get their ideas and experiences and advice. When I do courses, I don't want them to be like many of the useless courses I've taken over the years, I want them to be something special. Special to me doesn't say paying a high price for one course or a package of courses that you never actually get around to taking. And real success comes from not only watching course content, but implementing it and taking part in the community. So for me courses from B2Linked would have to be so much more than this. Well, I'm actually shaking right now, as I'm telling you this, I am so excited to announce that this dream is finally a reality. Because as of today, the courses are live. We created a community for you LinkedIn Ads fanatics, where for not a huge one time fee, but for a low monthly fee, you get access to all four courses that range from beginner to expert presented specifically and designed by me. But that's not all, you'll get access to the whole community. My highly specialized and highly trained to be to link staff are in this community answering questions and sharing valuable platform updates. I'm in there answering questions as well. You'll then have access to the combined knowledge and experience from all the other LinkedIn Ads fanatics in the community to bounce ideas off of and learn what's been successful for them. We are calling this community the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics. I feel so strongly that the value has to be there for you learners, especially here at launch for you founding members who will be some of the first in the community. So we priced it specifically low. $79/month gets you access to all the courses, as well as the future courses and additional content, all updates, plus unlimited access to the community. Then we have a higher tier for you A plus students out there, we're calling you super fanatics, you get access to everything that I've already talked about. Plus you get access to a weekly group workshop with me. And that's for a total of $279/month. These are all month to month no contract cancel whenever you need or if you stop getting value out of it. But as a bonus for our founding members, the first ones in those of you who subscribe before July 16 of 2023, you'll be grandfathered forever into the discounted rate of $59/month for the community and course access and $259/month for the higher tier super fanatics groups. So don't delay get in now as one of the founding members so that when prices rise in the future, you'll be cemented in at the lowest price that it will ever be. To go claim your spot as an official LinkedIn Ads fanatic and founding member go to fanatics.b2inked.com. And of course, you can always use the link in the show notes. if you can't figure out how to spell fanatics. Don't worry, I got you. But I can't wait to see you in the fanatics community Highlighting an awesome review of the podcast, Anna Rice, who's a digital growth marketing associate at Northern Trust Asset Management here in the US. She said, "Amazing insights. This show has become one of my go tos as a beginner turned expert in LinkedIn Ads. I discovered it at a B2B marketing conference when AJ held an expert session and I haven't missed an episode since. This is such an amazing tool and resource to learn about and optimized LinkedIn ads 100% recommend." Well, Anna, thank you so much. It's wonderful to hear that our content has helped you on your way to becoming a LinkedIn ads expert. It's so apropo considering that this episode is all about becoming an expert so you've really just lent a lot of credibility to the topic of the episode. Way to go. For all of you other listeners, please do go and leave us a review on Apple podcasts for the show. It's by far the best way you can say thank you for all the content that we keep putting out. And I'm always excited to shout you out on the episodes as well. All right. With that being said, we've got to get to the topic at hand,. Let's hit it! I'm going to go over some of the topics that I feel are most important to master. Specifically, if you want to be a LinkedIn Ads expert. The first really is campaign setup and structure, you can go back to episode seven to get the full basis there. But it's incredibly important to get a few things right here. First off, your campaigns need to be set up in an evergreen way. What I mean by that is your campaigns are here to stay. They're named in a way that your account stays organized for a long period of time. And you're not constantly creating a new campaign here, a new campaign there, and letting others fall to the wayside. The way that you do this is you name campaigns after the description of the audience, not the date you created it, or the content that you put in the ads, or anything like that. My theory here is that campaign names should describe the details about the campaign that won't change, and then you just don't go and change the things that can that means your campaign names should reflect the things that don't change, like your targeting, like your ad format, like your objective. Now, don't misunderstand me here, there are certain things about campaigns that you can and should adjust and change along the way. Most importantly, you should be adjusting your bids and budgets along the way. Which brings us to our next point here that you need to master. This is one that the vast majority of LinkedIn advertisers that I talked to just don't get. And that is your bidding and your budgeting, Episode 89, so a recent one, we went back and did a super deep dive into this with all the new objectives and everything. And there are a few things that you need to understand here at a basic level. The first is that LinkedIn's default bidding method for traffic is called maximum delivery and this is by far the most expensive way to pay for your traffic 90% of the time. This type of bidding is literally handing your wallet to LinkedIn and saying take whatever out of it you want. And if I could be so bold to say, this type of bidding being the default is the reason that costs are rising so rapidly on LinkedIn. Too many advertisers are just taking the default and running their campaigns and then LinkedIn just gets to increase your bids as high as it needs to outbid someone else. And they just are throwing more and more money into their pocket. So don't fall into this trap. Instead, start your campaigns by manual cost per click bidding, and bids significantly lower than what LinkedIn recommends. You can always increase those bids if you're not getting enough traffic. Now, I did mention that maximum delivery is the most expensive way to pay 90% of the time. Well, what is that 10% of the time where it's actually the best method? Well, that comes when your click through rates on your campaign are two and a half to three times the average click through rate for that ad format. So for instance, sponsored content has an average of .44% click through rates, and we find that we can switch to maximum delivery bidding when sponsored content is up over about a 1% click through rate. So when your click through rates are insanely high, that's when you want to use maximum delivery, otherwise avoided like the plague. The next topic to master is campaign segmentation. We covered this really well in Episode 65 of the podcast. So make sure you go back and listen to that. But I highly recommend that you break up your audiences into campaigns that have an audience size between about 20,000 to 80,000. We find that audiences that are less than 20,000 You may have to run them for potentially months before you get enough data back To tell whether or not they're working, and for your tests to become statistically significant. Now, if your audience sizes are much larger than 80,000, and in fact, LinkedIn themselves recommend over 300,000 in a lot of cases, we find that there's usually some way that you can then break up that audience into two smaller pieces to learn more about it. I just find that when my audiences are over about 80,000, there's usually something about that targeting that I can split into. Maybe I can break it up by company size, or seniority or something. And now these two smaller campaigns, they're serving the same purpose, but they both act like little mini focus groups that you can then learn from them. Now, there are plenty of those out there who suggest Nope, just keep one large campaign, and then look at your ad demographics later and decide which segments are performing and which aren't. But I will tell you, that is extremely limiting, you can't see how each micro segment actually engages with specific ad creative unless you break them out into separate audiences. Plus, if you're tracking parameters in your URLs, you need to actually be able to put those tracking URLs in ads that signal to you which ad and which campaign and audience they represent. The flip side of this is don't break them out so small that each segment doesn't get enough data. For budgeting purposes, we usually plan about one campaign per $750 to $1,000 per month in budget. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't have smaller retargeting audiences, or ABM targeting, those are all fine, just don't expect them to be pushing a whole lot of volume for you. The next topic that you'll need to master is offers. For us this is episode 10 goes into the kinds of offers that people are willing to engage in and convert on. But as a friendly reminder, cold traffic, yes, you can get them to fill out forms in order to access some of your content. But your conversion rate from MQL to SQL, like getting them on a meeting with your sales team is going to be near zero. Before you do this, you will have to do more nurture. But that episode is going to set you up really well for the kinds of content that work deeper down in the funnel. For any platform, you need to get comfortable actually in the platform, navigating around the user interface. Campaign manager is no different here, you have to have that experience, I recommend no matter what just getting in and messing around. Even if you don't actually launch an ad, get practice by just navigating and setting things up. The courses that we just launched in the fanatics community. Course Number one is actually holding your hand and walking you through LinkedIn's campaign manager. So I would highly suggest watching that course when you make it into the community. There are a whole bunch of technical aspects to LinkedIn Ads as well, that might not come naturally to you if you come into the world of digital marketing through more of the creative side. Those three areas here are understanding the insight tag, setting up conversion tracking, and setting up retargeting. All three of these revolve around the Insight tag so check out the blog post that we published just a couple of weeks ago here on what is LinkedIn's insight tag and how do you install it. Then episode 38 goes all into how to set up conversion tracking how to use it. And then those special cool what I would call ninja hacks and uses for it. Of course, it's super important to set up retargeting. You almost can't nurture traffic, and then expect meetings and demos without a retargeting setup. That's episode 58 so go back and listen to that in more depth. Alright, so you're advertising. Things are up and running. How do you know if what you're doing is working or not? I mean, for all, you know, if you haven't compared yourself to anyone or anything, you could be doing a crappy job. Or maybe you're doing amazing and you deserve a raise, but there's no one to know. That's why it's so important to understand the benchmarks of what to expect on the LinkedIn Ads platform. Go back and listen to episode 15 all about the benchmarks. So you can compare and see if what you're doing is working and if you're doing a good job. And of course, if you're not outperforming benchmark, don't beat yourself up, just take that as a clue that there's an area of the account that you need to now go and spend more time in. Now if your job is to manage everything around LinkedIn Ads, there are several skills that you need, or will at least need to be able to dabble in. There's creative creation. We really like to get comfortable with Canva to create imagery. But I also recommend getting comfortable with video creation and editing. Even if you're not going to do it professionally, just get enough experience that you know what goes into it. Spend time writing ad copy and other content even long form content. I know when I was in high school in college, I kept thinking, man, I can't wait to be done with journalism and writing. Those are skills I'm never going to have to use again. And now I use them every day. Same with math If by the way, so get really comfortable creating. And of course, you can always use something like chatGPT to help you out. But don't ever rely on and hand your job over to AI tool. Another skill that oftentimes gets overlooked is your general marketing strategy. This means actually understanding your positioning and your value in the marketplace. How do you then communicate that value? And how do you picture and help your customers through their journey? What's that holistic strategy? If you just go and become a LinkedIn Ads expert, you're going to miss out on all the other platforms and channels, how they all fit into your holistic strategy, you're gonna miss out on so much there. And yes, you can spend all day within campaign manager, but we've covered several things inside of campaign manager. But we've covered several things that you can't do in campaign manager that you have to do by exporting your data out of campaign manager and getting it into Excel. In the shownotes, you'll see a playlist that we put together on our YouTube channel, walking you through the creation of a whole bunch of Excel reports. Don't sleep on Excel, guys, it's not that hard, but can give you such a powerful lead over other marketers who are not willing to dive into the data. The two most powerful formulas that you should know in Excel are vlookup. And this isn't really a formula, this is pivot tables. I use pivot tables every single day, don't sleep on pivot tables, go learn them. And that YouTube playlist is going to help a lot because you'll see all of those things in action. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive back into what you need in order to become a LinkedIn one percenter, 16:39 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 and the in house team or any digital ads hire. Plus, it helps that we're official LinkedIn partners. Just go to B2Linked.com/apply. We'd absolutely love the chance to get to discuss with you. Alright, let's jump back in here. We'll go through the experience that you'll actually need to navigate LinkedIn and to become an expert. I'm sure this isn't news to you, but book learning will only get you so far. You actually need practical experience. It's totally possible to take courses and learn as much as you possibly can, but still be absolutely clueless when it comes to jumping in the platform and doing something simple. From my experience, most of you listeners fit into one of two camps. You're either a freelancer looking to learn, or an in house or agency marketer who's actually doing this for clients or yourself. If you're a freelancer looking to learn, I would highly recommend pick up a client that wants to advertise and is willing to give you a shot at actually running the thing for them. Your first one you could offer to do for free or cheap, it doesn't matter, just something so you're actually getting real world experience because the things that even you'll learn in our courses, they won't mean anything to you unless you have a real business purpose to actually apply them. So pick up that account and those accounts. And as you gain experience, you'll get to charge more to future clients as you get that experience, and especially confidence that comes from knowing that you actually know what you're talking about. If you're in house or agency, you are actually getting the experience hands on, which is fantastic, but every single episode from this podcast, everything you read, it has to be applied so you can learn it. So try to take every episode, every blog post away, and apply it to what it is that you're actually doing with your LinkedIn Ads account. That's about the best advice I can think of for those two camps. The next thing I think you need experience to understand is scaling and account. You don't understand the scale on any platform. Unless you've actually worked with it. It becomes really simple to scale. We've worked with some very large spending accounts. And after a little while, it feels like just the same old numbers you're used to dealing with just with a couple or a few zeros at the end, you get really comfortable with large accounts. And I hope all of you get the chance to scale a normal size account up to one that's very large, just so you get the experience. You do have to be very careful as you do this, but I'm excited for you to get to try. Then there's a skill that you have to get comfortable with because you're gonna use this forever, and that is optimization skills. You just have to watch the account and make adjustments and then look at what the effects are. I like to keep what I call a testing journal. Every time I make an adjustment or run a test, I'm making a note of what date I ran, what my hypothesis was. And then I always have to go back a week or two or three a month, whatever and actually compare, okay, what was the result of that test? This gets into continued education that I would highly recommend. And that is, you have to always be running AB tests. Episode 36 was all about the AB testing procedure that we recommend. But you've got to learn which ads resonate with your audience. Which ad types produce what kinds of predictable results? What results do I get if I bid differently if I bid higher or lower, or on a different bidding model? What about if I tried different objectives? We do this a lot with video,. There's three different ways that you can bid on video, you can bid by the impression, you can bid by the click or the view. And depending on your objective, depending on what it is you're trying to do, any one of those could be much more effective than others. And you could save a lot of money. But you have to actually run these tests. You've got to test different audience features different targeting different members of the audience. And you've got to learn how your audiences respond to changes in your bids, seasonality, creatives. One test I really like to do with this is do a 20% bid increase. If I bid up by 20%, do I get 20% more impressions? If so that was a perfect linear scale. But what if I bid 20%? Higher, and I get 25% more impressions? Wow. Now I actually just got access to more scale, and what have I been up 20%, but I only get 15% more impressions? Well, now I know I've hit the edge of diminishing returns. And I know that if I try to bid up on this audience, I'm just going to get less and less efficient. These are tests you have to run, and every audience is going to act a little bit differently. So make sure you've built a culture internally of AB testing, it will save your bacon. Throughout my career, it's been so sad to me to see marketers who had a lot of promise, and I see them kind of peter out, they lose the fire, and they stop doing things that actually advance their learning. One of the best recommendations I can give you is to keep that hunger and keep following up to date resources. I'm gonna keep doing everything within my power to keep coming out with episodes of this podcast. So certainly keep listening to this show. But there are also especially just in the last year, there are some great LinkedIn Ads pros on LinkedIn sharing what they know. If you follow the LinkedIn Ads hashtag, you should see all of that. We've got a YouTube channel where we're continuing to invest into more and better video. There are several other YouTube channels out there that cover LinkedIn Ads. So I highly recommend subscribing to them and watching them. Follow the B2Linked blog and our newsletter. Every week, we try to put something really good together that's going to be helpful to your career. And of course, we just announced the LinkedIn Ads fanatics community that is launching the day this podcast goes live. So if you're hearing this, it's active, I can't think of a better way for you to learn and grow and get experience and collaborate with others than joining the fanatics community. Again, that's fanatics.B2Linked.com, go check that out. I also recommend finding a mentor someone who drives you and holds you accountable, someone that you like to explore with and share results with. To me it's one of my good friends Mark Gustafson. I've mentioned him many times on the podcast. But I think everyone who's striving to be better need someone like that. I will mention if you sign up on the upper tier of the LinkedIn Ads fanatics community, I'll be personally mentoring you and meeting with you weekly, so I can help be a mentor to you as well. But if you don't have some sort of a mentor that you can look to keep your eyes open and try to find that person. Alrght, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up, so stick around. 24:11 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. Like we mentioned in the episode, there are so many different episodes and resources for you to check out. They are right here in the show notes. But you'll see the episode on campaign setup, bidding and budgeting, audience segmentation, offers that drive conversion. You'll see the blog post all about how to install LinkedIn's insight tag and what to do with it. The episodes on conversion tracking and retargeting and performance benchmarks to compare yourself against. There's the playlist on YouTube for how to do complex Excel reporting made very simple. There's the episode all about AB testing that I can't recommend enough. You'll see a link to B2Linked's YouTube channel that you can keep getting free value from, as well as a link to our blog. I've shared before, but if you want to check out the community, go to fanatics.B2Linked.com. I still have the LinkedIn Learning course. So although it doesn't cover nearly as much as the community, it's still a great course. If this is your first time listening, I would highly recommend hitting that subscribe button so you hear more of our content when you're mowing your lawn or commuting. But if you've been listening for a while, please do go and rate and review the podcast on Apple podcasts. It really is the best way that you can say thank you for all the research and work and cost that we put into this show. With any questions, suggestions, or corrections, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week for episode 101. We're cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Dashboard Lashay's Visual Framework Lashay on LinkedIn Follow AJ on LinkedIn NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Youtube Channel Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review!   Show Transcript AJ Wilcox What kinds of blog content reliably turns prospects into customers through your LinkedIn ads, you'll get the whole framework 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! If you've been a listener for a while, you know, I don't do interviews very often, especially outside of LinkedIn employees and partners. But Parker on my team heard today's guest on the Exit Five podcast, and she dropped so much gold, we had to have her on here. She's a content creation master. And she's going to share how us marketers can use blog content, along with our ads to result in closed business. She's really opening the curtain and sharing her full strategy on how you can do it too. So get ready to take some serious notes. Today's guest is Lashay Lewis. She lives near Washington, DC, and has plenty of stellar case studies on how her approach works. First off, I have to tell you that Lashay is so my people. She's a hardcore lover of B2B SaaS, she's got lots of kids like I do, she's an entrepreneur at heart, you're absolutely going to love her. Before we get into the interview, I have to tell you, this is episode number 99, which I am so stoked about. But get ready because we're going to have a full on celebration for episode 100 next week. We've got a big announcement coming. And I don't want to spoil it now, but you're not going to want to miss it. The review we want to highlight this week is from user Daniel356. And sorry, Daniel, I don't know who you are from your username. So I don't know how to thank you personally. But Daniel left this review, he said, "Best LinkedIn Ads resource on the interwebs. The LinkedIn Ads Show is by far the most insightful and comprehensive resource to stay up to date on LinkedIn Ads. You also get cool ideas and strategies you can try right away. I can't think of another podcast or piece of content on the interwebs that provides so much actionable information to run LinkedIn Ads properly. You can tell AJ and his team spend a lot of hours preparing each episode. I love the structure, because you can always come back to any episode in case you need a refresher." Daniel, thank you so much. I absolutely love this review, because you shared specifics about what you love about the show. And I'm absolutely honored that you'd leave it. As an aside, I don't always know when I'm reviewing a podcast what to say or how to share it. So I have to say that your review is an absolute masterclass in giving feedback. Ahuge sincere thanks for doing it for our show. And you if you're a loyal listener, I would absolutely love to have you go and leave a review on the show. The best place I found to do that is on Apple podcasts. And if you leave us a review, I'd love to shout you out live like this. All right, with that being said, let's hit it and jump right into the interview with Lashay Lewis. All right, Lashay Lewis, I'm so excited to have you here on the podcast. For those of you who don't know, Lashay Lewis is the founder of AuthorityPlug. Lashay tell us like give us your intro, brag a little bit. Lashay Lewis Yes. So thank you so much for having me. First of all, like you said, my name is Lashay and I am founder of authority plug. So what I do is I teach B2B SaaS companies how to create profit driven content marketing strategies. And a little bit about my background like I've been doing this stuff since I was 16 years old. I started off building Amazon affiliate sites for all my people out there that remember those? Started off doing that. That's where I first really gotten to the methodology of different parts of the funnel, top, mid and bottom. And the funny thing is, ever since I started doing that, I kind of have ingrained this methodology in me, but as I grew in my career, I realize you know what, SaaS companies would pay me a lot more to do this than just me going off and creating these small microsites and you know, a really low percentage commission. I'm like, Saas companies will pay me a whole lot to do this. Fun fact, I did not like working with SaaS companies. In the beginning, I actually did ecomm in the beginning. But I feel like that experience in ecomm actually transcended to B2B. And I feel like it makes me bring a different angle to the B2B marketing space. It's not as boring and you know, things as kind of like the stigma that's out there, like, oh, B2B has to be B2B does not have to be boring. And I think my time and ecomm kind of helped me bring that direct to consumer experience to the B2B space. AJ Wilcox I totally agree with that as marketers when we start blending disciplines and blending skills, we're able to make things a lot more interesting. Yeah, B2B should not be B2Boring. Alright, so the reason I'm having you on the podcast, I got to hear you share a methodology a strategy with the Exit Five podcast, which is a podcast dealing all in B2B stuff. I was floored by what you shared and several members of my team were floored with what you shared. So I was so excited to have you on those of you who are listening, you know that I don't oftentimes do interviews with people that aren't product people from LinkedIn. So that should signal just how excited I am about the conversation we're going to have. Lashay, tell us a little bit about the strategy that you helped clients implement? Lashay Lewis Yeah, for sure. So first, to kind of bring it back, I noticed that there was a gap in the market, I noticed a lot of content marketers, and you know, even SEO agencies, content marketing agencies focused a lot on how much traffic can we drive a company, instead of how many leads can we drive a company. So just from that, I wanted my differentiator to be being able to tie a number to my name, and being able to say, I can drive you X amount of leads per month. And when I came into the industry, I seen a gap there. And even working in SEO agencies and content marketing agencies and seeing all the fluffy reporting and things like that. I just knew I wanted to bring something different to the space. So that's what really kind of helped my positioning and saying, like, I create profit driven content marketing strategies for B2B SaaS companies, instead of just, I help you increase traffic. I feel like there's enough marketers out there promoting, I help you increase traffic. But my differentiator is that I help you increase leads in the door actual demos in the door through content marketing. AJ Wilcox And I would say that's the biggest ask that we have from our clients is, yeah, get us all the MQLs you want get us leads or whatever. But what we are really interested in is we want meetings, our sales team wants to have demos or meetings set up. And that's what we're judging success. That's where we can actually tell our ROI. And what you're sharing with us here, you're talking about how you can actually prove and take content to the meeting to the demo to revenue. And that's why I think this conversation is so incredibly important. Tell us how did you come up with the strategy? Lashay Lewis Yeah, so basically, again, you know, going back to my history with building affiliate sites, I kind of just took that same methodology, and applied it to B2B SaaS. So, you know, other content marketers do and agencies do is they focus on top of funnel, so they're looking at the keywords with the highest search volume, the highest amount of impressions, and how many clicks is this going to get and I'm looking at it a little bit differently, I like to look at it like, instead of starting top down, I like to start bottom up. And when I say bottom up, I'm referring to the bottom of the funnel. And usually, because even though the clicks and the impressions and the traffic, which is what I call top of funnel metrics, it's like, even though those are present, it's like the money is at the bottom of the funnel. And the reason aaS companies can't really attribute content to revenue is because they're too focused on top of funnel metrics until six to eight to 10 months down the line. And they're like, Okay, our traffic was growing. This was great. But how are we making money? When honestly, you should be asking that question from the jump. I feel like asking that question from the beginning would solve a lot of issues that SaaS companies deal with. It's like, a lot of them don't ask themselves this question until they're already knee deep into an SEO campaign. And like, okay, great. Yeah, this is awesome. But how are we making money? And a lot of agencies and content marketers alike can't answer that question. So the methodology I like to come into every engagement is starting bottom of the funnel and working my way up from there, because this is the quickest way to actually drive demos in the door through content marketing. AJ Wilcox And then how are you proving these demos? I'm assuming this is a connection to the CRM system in some way. Like, when you're working with a client, how do you prove that you are getting an ROI? Lashay Lewis Sure. So again, you know, working with a lot of different content marketing agencies, this was a gap that I've seen. So what I like to do is I like to use Looker Studio, and Google Analytics. So what I do is I just really create a dashboard that is able to filter certain pieces of content. So when I would work with clients, or, again, when I was looking at content marketing agencies, I would create a look or studio dashboard. And I would put the content that I specifically wrote in there, and it would actually track the demos that came from the content that I wrote specifically, I love to do that because it shows the C suite in the higher ups like here is how content is contributing to your MQL and not just MQL, but actual demos that you have like coming into the door. So it's just really Looker Studio and Google Analytics is really the only two things I use. But yeah, that's how I kind of show like the higher ups here is how content is contributing to actual revenue. AJ Wilcox Oh, that's nice. You're able to set a conversion action inside of Google Analytics. Lashay Lewis Yes. So goals and events and just being able to tie that directly into the Looker studio so you know in a higher up and or someone that wants to get a deeper knowledge on okay, how is this content marketing working for us? They can come in literally see which piece says of content are driving the demos. AJ Wilcox Perfect. So I expect that when you go to a team and you start telling them like, no, your focus doesn't need to be on ads going to demos or something, it needs to actually be on content. That's going to be a little bit of a mindset shift, especially for the executive team. How do you suggest that marketers are positioning and messaging this internally to get buy in from the executive team on this mindset ship? Lashay Lewis Yeah, no, that's a great question. And I feel like marketers need to make an SEO mindset shift. So when I say SEO, I don't mean search engine optimization, actually means sales enablement optimization, right? So they need to start looking at content as sales enablement. Because in all actuality, it is. It's like, if you have someone, a prospect that comes through the door, and they're, they want to know more about the product, you can send them a written case study. Actually good content will actually warm up a prospect before they even get to sales. So I feel like if leaders start switching their mindset and stop looking at content as like, oh, just this thing that we're publishing every month, just for the sake of doing it, oh, because other companies are doing it, and they look at it, like this piece of content can actually drive in sales, we can actually use this to warm up prospects, at every stage of the buyer journey, you're gonna get a lot further than just thinking like, oh, our content team is just producing what I call company updates style content, like, oh, our company did this this month. And when the truth is, people really don't care what your company did this month. Like they care about how your product can help solve their problems. AJ Wilcox So true. Alright, so you've talked about the types of content and starting from the bottom of the funnel? What blog pieces are you suggesting we create? And how do you decide what blog posts to send traffic to? Lashay Lewis Yeah, that's a really great question. So I like to decide on what blog pieces to create. So there's a couple of different modifiers that kind of helps you determine what a bottom of funnel article would look like. So example, like a modifier would be like best, or versus, or top, or best product for use case. So there's a couple of different ways to identify a bottom of funnel term. And usually, again, like, that's where I like to start. Going back to your second question, AJ, I feel like ads can actually be ran to all types of content, top, mid, and bottom of funnel. So if we were to methodically go through this step by step, so usually, companies run kind of like brand awareness, LinkedIn ad campaigns to top of funnel content. So maybe they're trying to promote an e book or a white paper, very, like high level top of funnel. And usually a lot of companies just stop there. And a lot of time I see when companies are trying to get demo signups. They're just like, okay, boom, here's our demo, here's our ad, you know, sign up for the demo, when it actually shouldn't be done like that, you should actually be nurturing this person from the top of the funnel down to the bottom. So maybe, for a top of funnel piece, maybe if we were talking about sales enablement, a top of funnel piece will be what is sales enablement, right? So that's somebody that's not exactly sure what sales enablement, is, you know, maybe they feel like they'll need it now. Or maybe they need it in the future, very, very high level information. So a middle of funnel article and example would be like, how to improve sales enablement, or how to create sales enabled content, right. So they know a little bit about sales enablement, but you know, they're still trying to kind of put the pieces together a little bit. Again, this is the middle of the nurture, like this is where you really want to take the time to educate them and continue to nurture them. A bottom of funnel piece would be best sales enablement software, right. So as it relates to LinkedIn Ads, so if you were to start start at the top of the funnel, you would get them into a lead magnet, maybe like an ebook or a white paper, again, take a middle of funnel article and retarget, that same person that just came in through top of funnel, you know, whatever they opted in for. And then even from there, you can retarget a person again, with a bottom of funnel ads, so best sales enablement software, and you've effectively nurtured this person. Now, the sales process may not look that linear, but just for demonstrational purposes, just for example, purposes, like that's essentially how companies should do this. And a lot of times what I see is like they're only running like brand awareness campaigns, or they're only running, sign up for demo, It's like, if you were to actually create an entire funnel strategy on LinkedIn, you would probably be seeing more signups than you're seeing now. Probably higher conversion rates and lower click costs. But again, a lot of companies don't do that. They're just like, okay, let's try to get as many people into this ebook, into this webinar, into this white paper as we possibly can. But then they don't think about okay, how do I retarget this person? How do I continuously nurture this person down the funnel and that's exactly what we were talking about earlier with sales enabled content. A lot of SaaS companies probably already have the content in their arsenal to execute on this, but they just don't know that they do. But yes, essentially, you should be nurturing somebody from the top all the way to the bottom, not just like, pushing top of funnel and then automatically Okay, sign up for a demo. It doesn't work like that, like you need to be nurturing them at every stage of the funnel. AJ Wilcox And in this strategy, isn't there a place for gating content? Or would you advocate like you leave this ungated all the way up until they're ready to schedule the demo, Lashay Lewis I do feel like there's a place for gating content, right, because we do capture emails and things like that. But it's tricky to say, but I think like a lot of content that's gated should be ungraded. Because to be honest, a lot of people don't care about the thing that you're selling. So it's like you want them to care, you want to give them as much information as they need. You don't want to gate everything. Now, on the flip side, again, there are some things that you should be getting again, because you want to get this information to be able to get them onto their email list to retarget them and remarket to them. But a lot of things that you have gated, you probably shouldn't have gated. Like a webinar, I probably wouldn't get that. And again, like, if I'm super top of funnel, I don't even really know what my problem is, and you're making me put in my email to sign up for a webinar, I probably really don't care that much, I'm not gonna lie to you like. You need to worry more about educating the customer before you ask for something. Like don't just come out the gate and ask for something like, even when we're talking about top of funnel content, like educate the customer down to a point where they're like, oh, okay, so I've learned a lot from this post. Now, I feel comfortable enough to give them my email. And even if I can relate this to my own business, it's like, I give so much value on a daily basis before I ever ask for anything. People that opt into anything that I have to offer, they feel comfortable doing it, I don't have to push them to do it. They willingly want to do it because I give so much free value. They're like if her free stuff, is this good? What does her paid stuff look like? Like what is behind the wall? So it's like a lot of companies just jumped the gun with wanting to gate everything, when that's actually slowing your growth. AJ Wilcox totally 100% grade, I find that B2B marketers in the past, we've been so in a hurry to gate things to try to get email addresses because we feel like that's what we need to do in order to introduce them to sales and start that nurturing process. But that also feels really desperate to be like from your very first interaction, expose yourself, tell us who you are. So if all you're doing is just giving value, yeah, as marketers, we have to wait longer to see the lead. But under your strategy, we may not be generating an MQL now, and then, you know, waiting weeks or months until that turns into an SQL. We are delaying that until MQL and SQL happen at exactly the same time, it's like, but now their sales ready. And now sales is actually probably going to close this lead. And it's a little exercise in patience, I think for us, as marketers Lashay Lewis For sure. And if I can relate it to like a real life circumstance, it's like me going out on a date and the guy asking to marry me after the first date. It's like, bro, let's do some stuff first. Let's get to know each other. Let's date for a little while. You don't make that ask right away, you need to be giving as much value away as possible. And then the person will opt in when they're ready to opt in. You don't force them to do that, because what's gonna happen is they're gonna get pissed off, they're gonna be like, you know what, screw this. They're gonna go to your competitor that has their content ungated, where they can learn more about the problems that they have. And what they're gonna wind up doing is rolling with a competitor instead of you. So I would definitely tell companies like consider ungating some of that content that you have. I'm not saying ungate everything. But it's like, you're asking for too much for somebody that's extremely top of funnel, it's like, now if they're bottom of funnel, they know what their problem is they're hurting, they need a solution. At that point, yes, they're kind of ready to make a deeper decision. Even past the lead magnet, now they're actually like ready to sign up for demo. But again, when somebody is top of funnel, like they don't care about your webinar, they don't care about your ebook, you want to educate them into caring about your webinar, or your ebook. And I just think that if companies made that another mindset shift, which is like ungate some of your stuff, it's holding back your growth by you not ungating. Ungate some of your stuff. AJ Wilcox And so if we can transition now you understand the strategy, you want to start creating content that is on gated, and we talked about starting from the bottom of the funnel. What are some of the tips and recommendations you'd have for a marketer? How do they actually go to start creating bottom of funnel content? Lashay Lewis Yeah, another great question. So if I could start with the issue, the issue is, even companies that have bottom of funnel content, a lot of them don't know it, but the companies that do know it, that content doesn't convert how it should for them because they're writing their bottom of funnel articles same way, they would write their top of funnel articles. And that's not how you would do that, because somebody that's bottom of funnel is way more aware of what their problem is than somebody that's top of the funnel. So when you start writing bottom of funnel content, you really have to get specific with the pain points, you need to get specific with the features that solve that pain point for that prospect. And again, it's like top of funnel is just like, what is this thing, the history of this thing, maybe topics, statistics, it's like very, very high level things that even AI can possibly write. But when you get down to the bottom of funnel, it's like, there's a disconnect they don't need. So if I'm looking for best sales enablement software, there's no reason I should go into your article and see any paragraph that says, what is sales enablement? At that point, you've lost me like I'm bouncing. So I think the difference is just getting the information inside of your organization to be able to craft bottom of funnel articles. So to dig into that a little bit. It's just interviewing subject matter experts within the org and just getting the information from them just the years of experience and just being able to extract their brain and put it in written text and be able to again, match the features of your product to the specific pain points that your audience is dealing with. That's what's going to convert not high level fluffy information, like they want to get down to brass tacks, like they want to know, at this point, how does your product solve my pain point, so get right to it, it's no need for an extended long intro or anything like that. I noticed a lot of companies make this mistake as well, they have like this extremely long intro well, you know, 50% of sales enablement, is based or they don't care, right, get to the point. If you're looking for a sales enablement solution, you're probably dealing with one of these three problems, pain point one, two, and three. Here's how you know, boom, some of the article and then get right into it. It's just totally different from how top of funnel content is written. And again, it's like leaders need to go through and assess how their bottom of funnel, if they even have any bottom of funnel content, they need to go through and assess how that bottom of funnel content is written. Is it written for conversions, or is it written as if I'm talking to somebody in a top of funnel article, very high level fluffy information? So I think the first thing to do is to like scan that bottom of funnel content and to see, is it written for conversions? Because just because you have bottom funnel content, doesn't mean you're going to convert has to be written the right way? AJ Wilcox Oh, totally true. I'd say it's deceptive. It seems like it'd be very simple to do, because hey, this is you writing content that's very close to your product. It's bottom of funnel. But then I can also see marketers probably making some serious mistakes, like you talked about addressing, like too much of a top of funnel piece when you're not in the mindset that your prospect is actually in at that moment. Yeah. As a consultant as an agency, when you're helping other people to do this, is this very difficult? Because they know their product better? They know their customer better? And you're helping consult like, is there a world where someone from outside could come in and help with this? Or does this need to be done by someone who's internal? Lashay Lewis Yeah, that's a great question. So even as a consultant, a lot of companies don't have their information together consolidated. So even if I'm coming up as a consultant, I can still help drive the strategy. It's just the gap is companies don't have their information all together. And not just for me as a consultant. But even for your in house writers, you need to have all of this information together for them. Because what's happening is, they're hunting around or trying to, you know, if you guys were even doing interviews, because I know a lot of SaaS companies don't even hold subject matter, expert interviews, and they should, but your writers are going around trying to land these interviews and trying to do this and trying to do that. When if you had all this information consolidated for them, they could spend more time writing and less time trying to reach out to different stakeholders to get information. Because this was a huge pain point for me, when I was writing with content marketing agencies and in house at aaS companies like I would have to go and dig and search for all this information that should have been together for me previously. So I think that's the first thing. It's like having all of your information consolidated. So not just me as a consultant, but an in house writer can come in and say, Okay, here's the ICP, here's what they struggle with. And you might have different ICPs that's when it gets a little bit more nuanced. It's like, you'd need to have all of this information together for you know, consultants for in house writers, for freelance writers, for SDRs that come in that need to learn about the product. It's so many different use cases of why you need to have all of your information together. And so many companies missed the mark on this. I was freelancing for years and years and years and none of the SaaS companies that I worked for dot this right, none of them. So I think just being able to speak on that alone, I know I'm good. I resonate with somebody right now, you need to start consolidating your customer information, it's going to help your team so much better, they're going to spend less time researching actually more time creating high quality pieces. AJ Wilcox And that is so worth your time as a marketer, actually defining these things. Because I think, right, like first touch, first blush, it probably feels to a marketer, like, this could be a waste of time, like, Oh, I'm taking time away from doing my actual work to create the strategy and think, but all of a sudden, when you have that, when you have this document, like you're talking about, where you truly understand your product, and the pain points that your customers are feeling, now all of a sudden writing content is super easy. And you can hand it to an agency because it's concise. And it's really easy to write ad copy and create new offers. So I think this is absolute gold, but you've just shared Lashay Lewis And I think, on the surface, it may seem like it's a waste of time. But once you have all this information together and your in house writers or freelance writers or, you know, SEO agencies that you're working with get a hold of this information, it's going to change the way you do content marketing, it's going to change the speed of which it's done, it's going to change the quality in which it's done. Again, because a lot of your competitors aren't doing this. So if you were to actually take this advice and actually go run with it, you're probably going to be ahead of a lot of your competitors that don't have their information together, they just have writers on the team, they're like, Okay, so choose a keyword, write some content around it, you know, boom. And here's another thing he gets like, this is the reason I'm able to get more inbound demos from four blog posts a month, and others are able to get the 20 plus a month, it's because I focus on quality over quantity, I'm talking to the ICP, I'm matching features with pain points, I'm talking about the feature benefit, I'm talking about the future consequences. It's not difficult to conceptualize when you have all of the information together, because it's like whoever's writing, the article can pick and choose what they want to put in the guide. And it's like, it all comes from subject matter experts within the company. So you may not and I know another pain point was like, oh, having to view you know, interview subject matter experts for every piece is such a time suck, and this and that. But again, this is the importance of consolidating that information. It's like, maybe hold one or two or three interviews, and then take the information from those interviews and put it together, you really don't have to interview too much more after that, especially for bottom of funnel pieces. Because a lot of the content is the same. It's just written for different ICPs. And the angles might be a little different. But the general features and the pain points are basically the same, but the angle might be a little bit different. But again, if you have all of that information, consolidated, you don't have to contact for five or six stakeholders, you have this consolidated info, and you're picking and choosing what you want to put in the article. And it's not just random information that you got from Google, you got this information from inside of your organization, this is exactly the customer that we're talking to, you know what I mean, it's just so much easier on your writers to do this. And this is something else I preach as a content marketer, I don't feel like we're appreciated the way we should be appreciated. It's like, good leadership is going to make sure these things are together for your content team to be successful. AJ Wilcox I totally agree. I feel like we should have a culture of interviewing, this shouldn't be something that you're just like, oh, all of a sudden, we need to start doing some of these interviews with subject matter experts. I think there needs to be this culture of we interview our prospects, we interview our current customers, so we can understand more about their pain points more about what they're looking for. So we can give them what they're asking for. We need to be interviewing, maybe someone in sales or engineering or something. But we need to be having these interviews with subject matter experts. So you've totally won me over on that. I think that's super valuable. Lashay Lewis Absolutely. And you just saying that just kind of reminded me of something else. Like, even outside of subject matter experts. Like you need to be interviewing sales and customer success. Because again, you know, like I mentioned on the exit five podcast, it's like, sales gives you a vision of what life is like for the prospect before they have your product. And then customer success gives you a vision of what life is like after they have your product. And your product is the bridge between the before and after. That's storytelling. If you can storytelling, your content, you're gonna be able to drive some sales. But the problem is companies don't storytellers. They go on Google and they copy what everybody else is doing when the reality is those people are probably not converting so you copying them is doing yourself a disservice. AJ Wilcox Totally. So I think we need to ask about AI because you did mention AI. There's bottom of funnel content that AI can't create. What do you see AI? Where does it play in to this process? And what do you see it doing to content strategy and content writing as we go? Lashay Lewis Yeah, so I feel like AI can definitely play a part in the process. It would be like I mentioned earlier, it'd be like more top of funnel because the way AI gets his information as it gets it from the internet, right? So it's getting it from other articles that are already out there, the thing that it doesn't do is it doesn't get information with inside your organization. So it's more difficult to have AI write, middle of funnel and bottom of funnel articles again, because that information is not coming from Google, it's coming from within your company. So AI plays a good role when it comes to just thought ideation, you know, okay, so how should I, you know, write this headline? Or how should I do this? Or what does a good outline of an article look like? AI is excellent for ideation, that I will say, I wouldn't even say it's bad for top of funnel content, because it's good. It's only so many ways that you can write a top of funnel piece with like, what is sales enablement, right? So again, when we go back to our sales enablement, example, there's only so many ways that you can explain the same thing. But even for top of funnel piece, I would still say maybe you should hold an interview for top of funnel piece as well, because a subject matter expert may have a contrarian opinion or something different to bring to the table that no other website or your competitors or whatever have even talked about. So I wouldn't even say go full blown AI on top of funnel content, but it definitely can be used more with top of funnel than it can with bottom a funnel, most definitely. Even, just to you know, I know, we kind of been talking about this, but to kind of like, touch on this a little bit. Something that I would love to bring to the industry is an AI product that can actually scan customer calls and customer information and be able to help you create an outline based on the specific information of your ICP, not information that was found on Google. So it's something I've got in the works right now. But as of right now, as you know, AI stands it's like, don't use it to write your bottom of funnel content. It's just not there yet. And until someone comes up with a product that can actually do these things, like let AI play its part but don't think that, you know, you can tell you, right, okay, you know, use Chapt GPT and AI to create, you know, 50 articles for us. Because what's gonna wind up happening is, somebody's gonna have to clean up that mess later on. You cheeping out on your content marketing, your SEO is probably going to be the most expensive mistake that you make. AJ Wilcox I think you bring up a really good point about where I think AI is going to go in the future. And the Jordan Harbinger show, it's one of my favorite podcasts, they actually ended up doing this. They pushed all of their episodes all probably their transcripts into ChatGPT. And then they have this chat bot that you can go and ask any question about the show. And it'll say oh, and in Episode 364, they talked about this topic, go listen to that. I would love that for the LinkedIn Ads Show because by the time we record, this is episode 99. We've 99 episodes, and I don't remember everything I said in all of them. And sometimes I shared some gold and then have totally forgotten it later. Yeah, I love the idea of like, sick AI on your internal content on the output from these subject matter experts. And now all of a sudden, you have more opportunities to create content without having to just have a new interview every time you want to write something. Absolutely. AJ Wilcox Here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive 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. Do you want a return on it? 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 that allow us to confidently optimize and scale your LinkedIn Ads faster and more efficiently than any other agency, in-house team, or internal digital ads hire. Plus, we're official LinkedIn partners. To apply just go to B2Linked.com/apply and we'd absolutely love the chance to get to chat with you. AJ Wilcox Alright, let's jump back into the interview with Lashay Lewis. AJ Wilcox So we've talked about how to create the bottom of funnel content. Do you have any tips or recommendations for us on how we could create more middle and top of funnel content? Lashay Lewis Yeah, for sure. So middle funnel content, what a lot of people don't know about that is that middle funnel content can actually drive demos as well. It's just really all dependent on how you angle it. So for example, if we go back to our sales enablement example, it's like, you know how to improve sales enablement or how to create a sales enabled process or something along those lines. It's like two angles that you can use for middle of funnel. Okay, so let's say the term that we're going after is how to improve sales enablement. So if you have a product that helps people improve their sales enablement, one angle you could take is actually doing kind of like a demo walkthrough of how someone wouldn't be able to improve their sales enablement with your product, and then have a call to action to say, did you like what you're seeing, you know, sign up for demo. Angle number two is you could take them through the manual process of how to improve their sales enablement, and then angle it and say, well, instead of doing all that, you could just sign up for our product, we do this than the third, we automate this entire process for you sign up for a demo. And I know this is a common occurrence because as much as I love bottom of funnel, like there are only so many bottom of funnel terms before you exhaust everything. But here's when you start to get crafty with angles and things like that when you move up to the middle of funnel, because there are a lot more middle of funnel terms. And there are bottom of funnel terms. But again, it's really all about how you angle that content in order to be able to drive that demo. And with top of funnel content. It's really just, again, educating the customer as much as possible in order to be able to get them into something gated not pushing the gated thing right out the door. It's like, for example, there's no reason you shouldn't be getting a case study. Like I don't know who I'm calling out right now. But underneath the case study dude, like, let it go, you need to enable your potential prospects to be able to get a vision of what life is like, using your product case studies does that it's like no, they're not going to put in their email to get a case study from you. Like that's something you should be willing and able to give to them to show them value. Here's how our company can help you. Right. So I think, as it relates to just creating top of funnel pieces, it's just you want to educate them as much as possible. Again, if you can get a subject matter expert to give some golden nuggets of information or contrary and opinion, just deep expertise on the topic, it's going to shine through your content every time. So different stages of the funnel requires, I don't want to say a different level of expertise. But it just requires you to get deeper and deeper as you go down the funnel. Again, you know, top of funnel content can be pretty high level because the person doesn't know exactly what their problem is yet. And then as you get to the middle of funnel, they're starting to Okay, I have this problem. I'm not quite sure how to solve it. But let me look and then bottom funnel like they're ready to sign up. It's just about understanding the buyer journey, and then understanding how to angle each piece of content based on where they are in their journey. AJ Wilcox And I think the mark of success of a good funnel strategy is you start to see demos along the way, even when they haven't made it to the bottom of the funnel yet. Absolutely. And it's because you're answering the right questions, you're addressing the right things as you go. Yes. 100%. Alright, so as the time of recording thought leader ads at LinkedIn have not come out yet. The the date that I've heard is June 15, of 2023. LinkedIn is going to be releasing these new ads where we can start promoting personal posts rather than posts that come from companies. How would you see this as affecting the content sharing strategy? Lashay Lewis Yeah, I think this is going to be huge for product evangelists. Because this is something I've said time and time again, it's like personal profiles, at least from what I've seen, like do better than business profiles on LinkedIn. So I think this is going to be huge for people that are product evangelists for their company. If you're in leadership right now, and you don't have a product evangelist, you and you're actually running a LinkedIn strategy, you may want to think about getting one because I just feel like this feature is just empowering us more. And when I say us, I mean like individuals, it's just empowering us to be able to really become influencers in this b2b space. I know that's something that's, you know, arisen. And you know, a lot of people think that's only for B2C. But influencers are actually rising in the b2b space, I think it's a viable strategy that SaaS companies should probably start paying close attention to there's a reason that LinkedIn is coming out with this feature, because they see what's going on. I want to say if you stay ahead of the curve, you're going to be good to go. I'm not gonna say like, oh, this is a, you know, there's a certain time period that we're going to put on this. But I would definitely say like start paying more attention to having product evangelists in your company, because this is going to do nothing but push that initiative even more. AJ Wilcox Oh, beautiful. Okay, so in our pre interview chat, as we were talking, you mentioned several times where you've seen this work very well with Facebook Ads. I know that things that tend to work well on Facebook Ads are probably going to work really well, if not better on LinkedIn Ads. Yeah. Can you share one prominent example of this process working with Facebook? Lashay Lewis Yeah, for sure. So I have a client that's in the accessibility space. So basically, software that kind of helps websites become compliant with accessibility to people with disabilities and things like that. So one of the issues where he had a lot of top of funnel content, again, a lot of traffic, but it wasn't generating any demos. So what we kind of set in place was to run Facebook ads to our bottom from a content that we hadn't, you know, newly created, and what that did for us, at least I found anecdotally, like it helped us rank higher in Google. And it also gave us insight into which bottom of funnel pieces specifically, we're going to convert before others. So the reason that's so important is because if you know which content pieces are going to convert, even before they're ranking in Google, like you can put a priority on those specific content pieces. So just imagining having a crystal ball, and being able to see into the future and knowing this piece of content is gonna rank. One of those pieces of content is going to convert if you're able to rank it in Google. So that's how even getting into like how I methodically rank content, everything I do is data driven. If I'm running Facebook Ads to a bottom of funnel piece, and I'm seeing like, it's actually converting from the Facebook Ads, good chance that if I rank it organically, it's going to convert as well, it's probably going to convert even better. So that's really how I put a prioritization on which articles I rank. I'm not just guessing, and I'm really being very data driven. And it's like, if I see, you know, this article got to conversions. Okay, let's put a priority on ranking this piece. And then, you know, I know we're talking about Facebook ads, but this relates to Google Ads, because I know a lot of SaaS companies are running paid ads as well. So this relates to Google Ads and LinkedIn Ads, like right, so it's like, your paid ads strategy can actually fuel your organic strategy. So if I could dig into this really quick, like, another I know, we talked about two mindset shifts already. Mindset shift number three, stop looking at paid and organic as competitors and start looking at them as teammates, right? So your paid ads can actually fuel your organic strategy. So if you're currently running a Google Ads strategy, go to your AdWords account, and take a look at the content that's actually converting right now. And ask yourself, can I create a blog post around the same topic. And the thing is, it's like, once you do create that blog post, and let's say you rank it, you now have two pieces of real estate on the first page to be able to drive demos. Again, it's like Google AdWords will give you a forward view of what is already converting for us. Let's take that and use that to drive organic strategy. And again, it's just a leaky bucket. It's like something that companies are doing, you know, running ads, but they're not using that to fuel the organic side, they're just like, okay, these are two separate things, we need to keep them like that, when in all actuality, a lot of your organic strategy is probably rooted in what you've been doing on the paid ads side. AJ Wilcox I love that. Alright, so if LinkedIn advertisers want to start using the strategy that we've been talking about, where do they need to start? Lashay Lewis If I could give a step by step order on what they need to do? The first thing to do would be do a content audit, right? So do a content audit of the website. First, understand if you even have any bottom of funnel content, okay. So if you do have bottom of funnel content is it written for conversions? Again, defer earlier into the episode of how I you know, mentioned that bottom of funnel content should be written. If you feel like it's written for conversions, that's when you start retargeting people that are already in your ecosystem with those bottom of funnel ads. So it's really just as simple as that. It's really no more complicated than that. It's just really about putting your bottom of funnel glasses on and just starting to understand how these pieces play a role. And then just start incorporating them into your LinkedIn strategy. Just like that from top to bottom. AJ Wilcox And then what comes next, I know you've got some cool resources that you've shared on your LinkedIn profile. You even had some posts go very viral, where you were sharing some free resources. Can you talk a little bit about those and share with us those resources? Lashay Lewis Yeah, so one of the things I didn't mention is one of the places to start is by you know, like we said earlier in the episode is like consolidating your information. So I want to say three months ago, I came out with a content marketing dashboard that helps SaaS companies easily be able to consolidate all of their information for freelance writers, for consultants that come on board for agencies for you know, whomever, so I have that resource. And you can find that at authorityplug.com/content-dashboard, just go there, grab the dashboard, it's a notion, it's really going to help you think through who your ICP is, if you have multiple ICPs. It's going to help you run through that has quite a few things in it. It has a tracking dashboard that lets you set up your Looker Studio to be able to see which specific pieces of content are driving demos. But all in all, you want to start with making sure your information is consolidated how we talked about earlier in the episode. So more than welcome to go and grab a dashboard. That's going to be the first step into everything that we've talked about. AJ Wilcox Oh, and this is such a cool resource. I want to encourage everyone who's listening, go grab this dashboard. Lashay is giving this away for free. And it's awesome, Lashay Lewis For sure. And for anybody that kind of wants to visually see this methodology in place, again, what we talked about how starting, you know, with bringing somebody in through LinkedIn as top of the funnel, and then retargeting them with middle funnel and bottom of funnel content, I have a visual framework that will be linked in the show notes that gives a wonderful visual of kind of like, how this would work, what type of topics are considered top of funnel, middle funnel and bottom of funnel? And exactly just how to, you know, run through this process. AJ Wilcox And it works really well with the dashboard as well. They work well in tandem. Lashay Lewis Yes. And you know, speaking of that AJ like even on LinkedIn, like I come up with visual frameworks multiple times per week. So anybody that wants to learn content strategy through visual because I'm a visual learner. So anybody that's a visual learner that wants to learn content strategy, or more about how a strategy can fuel your LinkedIn ads, definitely follow me on LinkedIn, I dropped visual frameworks every week. AJ Wilcox Oh, I love that such a cool resource. Alright, so we are going to link to Lashay's dashboard and the visual framework, as well as her on LinkedIn. So make sure you go and follow her go check out these free resources. You don't want to miss that. All right. And then finally, there's the question I like to ask people that I'm interviewing, what are you most excited about personally, right now? Lashay Lewis I would say, probably my fitness journey. That's the thing that's really been fueling me. It's gotten my mental health so much better. And I've heard people say this so much. It's like, just the discipline. And everything that I've learned from fitness is just bleeding over into business. It's really bleeding over in every aspect of my life. So the thing I'm most excited about personally, is definitely what I've been doing as it relates to fitness and mental health, for sure. AJ Wilcox So cool. All right. And then what about professionally, what are you most excited about in your business right now, Lashay Lewis I'm most excited about being able to partner with B2B SaaS companies on creating their content strategy, like, content strategy, to me is just so fun. It's just like my zone of genius. The thing I'm most excited about is my consultancy, for sure. Just being able to really touch a lot of people. Honestly, when I first started this, I'm like, well, you know, how much of an impact and I really have, I'm really just talking about marketing and sales and things like that. But to read the endless amount of messages I get on a daily basis, and the emails I get, and just how I've been able to impact people in their processes and how they've been able to just achieve so many results, just from the basic knowledge that I think is basic, but to other people's gold. Yes. But just from the knowledge, I've been able to share just how it's impacting people like it's really bigger than marketing. When you take a step back and look at it. It's amazing. So I look forward to continue to provide value to anybody that's willing to listen. AJ Wilcox Well, let's share we are cheering you on. Thanks so much for dropping all of this gold. It's all stuff in your mind that's simple marketing, but honestly, so much of this was groundbreaking. So thank you so much for sharing it with the LinkedIn Ads Show audience. Lashay Lewis Thank you for having me. AJ Wilcox All right, I'vegot 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. AJ Wilcox So Lashay mentioned her content dashboard. So check right below in the show notes, you'll see the links to her content dashboard. I also put a link to Lashay's awesome LinkedIn post about her visual framework, she actually walks you through an example of gongs marketing that I think you're going to love, so check that out. You'll also see a link to her LinkedIn profile o go follow where there. Ask to connect and all that. If you're new to LinkedIn ads, or you know anyone who is check out the course that I did with LinkedIn Learning, you'll see the link right there in the show notes as well. It's by far the lowest cost and the highest quality course out there. If this is your first time listening, welcome, and make sure to hit that subscribe button if you want to hear more of this. But if this is not your first time, I would encourage you please do rate and review the podcast. It helps us share the show with more people who are going to find it valuable. And it's by far the best way that you can say thank you for everything we put into the show. With any questions, suggestions or corrections, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. I'm cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Demographics & Analytics Episode Bidding Episode Relevancy Score Episode Follow AJ on LinkedIn NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Youtube Channel Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review!   Show Transcript Are you having trouble spending your budgets on LinkedIn? It's a common problem. And we're talking about how to spend your daily budgets without getting gouged 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! One of the challenges that we regularly face with LinkedIn Ads is difficulty actually spending our defined budget, it's actually really easy to spend your full budget if you don't mind paying too much for your ad traffic. But we're operating on the assumption that you're a sophisticated marketer that doesn't want to overpay. So on today's show, we're going to talk about all the aspects of spending your budget and how to do it efficiently. First, in the news, Shae on our team, she is winning every award right now for finding new stuff, she noticed that some of the accounts she's working on have a new UI change, where when you hover over a campaign group name, or a campaign name, the edit button appears right underneath. And this has been really confusing to advertisers for a long time. Because if you know, if you click on the actual campaign name or the campaign group name, it assumes you want to see the performance underneath that and the ads underneath it and not access the settings. So how many confused clicks have happened over the years where someone clicks on the campaign name, because they want to get to the settings just to realize that they are now in the wrong place. And they have to hit the back button. I bet that there have been collectively 10s of years wasted on that particular oddity in the user experience here. So the fact that we have a nice easy edit button, right, as soon as you hover over, you don't have to hit the three dots over to the right, I think is actually going to save a lot of time and a lot of headaches. Like I mentioned, this is only in some of our accounts so it's probably on a rollout. I would imagine that everyone listening will probably have it within two, three weeks. Corey on our team also noticed something and honestly, he actually noticed this month's back, and I made a note and I just forgot to tell you guys, so here we go being transparent. It used to be that we could get ads approved that had up to three emojis in the ad. But now he realized that we're limited to two emojis, unless it's a video ad. We don't know how many more emojis that we can stick in a video ad. But we know that it's more than two. So Cory, thanks so much for pointing that out. I wanted to quickly highlight a review that's been left here on the show, Mony Chhim, who's a LinkedIn Ads specialist out of Toulouse, France. He left the review, "Best podcast for LinkedIn Ads. Great podcast. Thank you, AJ." Hey, Mony, I hope I'm pronouncing your name right. Thanks so much for taking me up on my invitation to leave the show review. I really appreciate it. You rock. All right, anyone who's a regular listener, I want to invite you please do leave us a review, I want to shout you out live as well. All right on to the subject at hand. Let's hit it. First, I think we need to define what budget means because there are so many different definitions to be aware of the first meaning of budget is your actual budget. This is the money that you have set aside as a company to spend on LinkedIn Ads. So for instance, if your boss comes to you, or your VP of marketing or whatever, and says you have $15,000 a month to spend on LinkedIn Ads, that's your actual budget. Now that actual budget is going to be dispersed among several different campaigns most likely, then we have a campaigns daily budget. This is the daily budget that set on the campaign level. And this is mostly what we're going to be talking about today. LinkedIn allows itself to overspend your campaigns daily budget by I think 50%. So this isn't really a hard and fast rule. But we rely mostly on these campaign daily budgets, then there's also a lifetime campaign budget. Now this is where you can kind of just give money to a campaign and set it and forget it walk away. As soon as it's spent all of your lifetime budget, then it will pause the campaign. Now, I will admit we don't use lifetime budgets very often because I see it as being very much a lazy way to manage LinkedIn. And of course, we're not lazy and how we manage. But this is a tool that you actually have in your tool belt. Alright, so with spending full budget, like I mentioned in the intro, it's really easy to spend your entire daily budget on LinkedIn, but I guarantee you that you will pay too much in the process. What you do here is that you set all of your campaigns to the default bidding method, which is called maximum delivery. And whatever you have set as your daily budget, the system will bid as high as it needs to to spend that entire budget. So even if it has to bid $1,000 CPM, it'll do it. And if you're a regular listener, you know that max delivery bidding is the most expensive way to pay for your LinkedIn traffic 90% of the time. But if you're like me, and you don't want to pay LinkedIn more than you have to for ad traffic, you'll want to bid manually. Now, one of the results of bidding manually is that you'll set your daily budget and your bid, but if that bid isn't strong enough to get enough impressions to yield enough clicks to actually spend your budget, then you won't hit it. For more insight, specifically into bidding to get lowest costs on LinkedIn, go back and listen to and this is a recent episode, Episode 89. That's all about it, and it's updated when we go super deep. I'll also mention that spending your daily budget isn't something that you actually need to do. In fact, most of the time, I don't even count on spending my daily budgets. That's because it's actually better for performance, if we set daily budgets higher than we actually want them to be. But we set the bids just low enough until it naturally spends the actual budget. And then that way, if there's a sudden influx of interest or activity on the platform, it can naturally overspend a little bit, but I know other days, it'll understand. Alright, so let's say that you're not hitting your daily budgets, or you're just not spending as much as you want to be. Well, it's important to understand the levers that you have to pull and what actually determines how much you're going to spend. So the four levers that you have in spending your daily budget are number one, your audience size, number two, your click through rates, number three, your bid, and number four, your audience activity level. Here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into exactly how to find which of these levers needs to be pulled to fix your spending struggles. 6:44 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 a return on that? 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 or in house team or digital ads hire. Plus or official LinkedIn partners. To apply to work with us just navigate to B2Linked.com/apply. And we'd absolutely love the chance to get to chat with you. All right, let's jump into how do we figure out which of these elements is actually holding your LinkedIn ads account back. Our first lever here is audience size. Now we want to look at the audience size of the campaign, which you can do by hitting edit on the campaign settings, it'll show you there in the upper right hand corner. If you don't have anything to compare to, you may want to look at other campaigns that you've run in the past and how much they were capable of spending. We really like audience sizes to be between 20,000 to 80,000. But this is a general guide because we know that if you have an audience of 20,000, and your budget is $15,000 a month, there's just no way you're actually going to spend on that audience. Or if you do, you're going to spend way too much for the traffic you get. So you want to go and compare to another known similar audience size to see what it's capable of spending. And then you can ask yourself, is my budget appropriate for the audience size that we're going after? As soon as you start bidding more than you have to for that traffic, you'll be paying too much for the traffic, we'll get a little bit deeper into that too. But let's say you find that your audience size is too small for your budget. Naturally, you'll want to look for ways that you can expand your audience, you obviously don't want to go in and start adding people who aren't part of your target audience. That doesn't make sense. But you could go and identify new audience segments that are relevant to expand your reach. The next lever we have is click through rate. So if you are bidding by the click and you're not spending your budget, you may just not have a high enough engagement rate. I'll give you an example. If you have a sponsored content ad that has an average click through rate, it'll probably be getting about .44% click through rate. And then if you go and launch an ad that actually has a .8% click through rate, you can pretty much double your budget with the same audience size. So we find out that how often your ads get clicked on and how interesting they are to your audience actually means more than just your audience size. If your ads aren't interesting enough to get the right clicks, you'll want to test new ad creative and angles and hooks and offers. You'll want to refresh your ad creative and copy. All of this until you actually find ads that perform better that get higher click through rates. And Eric, my head of marketing, he recommends testing only one thing at a time because when the change happens, you won't know what drove the performance up or down if you change multiple things at once, pull more than one lever at the same time. Something else you can do that can affect your click through rate is actually to adjust and change your targeting. If you're showing the right message, but you're showing it to the wrong audience, it's still going to be a failure. So go back and check Episode 54, where we talked all about ad demographics. You can go and check your demographics tab, look at the criteria of those that are getting served impressions, those that are clicking, and even those that are converting if you're using lead gen forms. And if you see any of those audience segments that don't make sense for your product, or service or whatever, you can start excluding them. Okay, the next level we have is your bid. So let's just assume that your click through rate is staying constant. Maybe you have an ad that's already performing well, or multiple ads that all have about the same click through rate, assuming that your bid now is what determines how many impressions that you're going to qualify to receive. And if you remember our episode 72, all about relevancy score, you'll know that it's your bid, plus your relevancy score that determine how many auctions for the impressions you win. So if you're bidding too low, you won't get enough impressions, to get enough clicks to actually spend your budget. In this case, you may need to raise your bid. If I'm launching a campaign with no prior history, I'd probably start incrementally raising my bid, depending a little bit on how much I'm off. So let's say I'm underspending, my budget by hundreds of dollars, I'm probably going to increase my bid by increments of $1. So I might go up to $7 or $8 per click. But if I'm only off by $10, $20, I might increase my bid by 10 to 50 cents. That's just an approximate level that you can start but adjust based off of how your audience reacts. But here's a word of warning for you, Audiences that are on the smaller side, raising your bid may not actually get you more traffic. You could actually just be paying more for the same traffic. So here's the methodology that I would recommend it actually approaching this test. So let's say you have a small audience, and you actually have kind of high bids, what I would do is, after about a week, I would raise my bids by 20% and I want to take note of my impression count, my clicks count, and my cost per click during that week interval. Then after that next week is over, I want to go and compare the results from that 20% bid increase. If I noticed that my impressions and my clicks increased less than 20%, then I know that increasing my bids isn't actually the answer, the audience activity, the audience size, I'm already capturing the majority of them. So bidding higher just means I'm paying more. However, if I actually increase my impressions by over 20%, then I know that the audience size isn't the limitation here. And it's actually my bid that's causing me not to spend my whole budget. So that's a test you can do it, it actually doesn't matter what audience size you're working with. It's just the smaller your audience, the more likely it is that your audience size is the issue. Okay, let's jump to the fourth one, which is your audience activity. If you have an audience of 20,000 people who never go on LinkedIn, of course, you're going to have a hard time spending your budgets. We know that some audience segments tend to be more active on the platform, and therefore create more ad inventory that gives you more opportunities for your ads to show and you'll get more impressions and more clicks. We pulled an example from two of our accounts. With one account, we're targeting dentists. And we've noticed that it's actually kind of hard to spend money on dentists and medical professionals like doctors. And I would imagine that this is an audience activity issue. So we grabbed some stats, and I want to compare them side by side. We have dentists versus marketers. The audiences were similar. The dentists were about 30,000 and the marketers were about 25,000. So it's not quite apples to apples as a comparison, but you'll see it's close enough that we can draw some conclusions here. On dentists, we spent $238 during that week, and on marketers, we spent $122. So we spent about half on marketers, but look at this reach that we got. With dentists we only reached 1300 of these people that's unique dentists who received an impression that week, but marketers we reached 1800. So 1300 versus 1800. And then we looked at the frequency. We could see see that marketers received an average frequency this week. And sorry, I'm saying week but I actually mean month this was done over the course of a month, the frequency of marketers was 2.74. But the frequency for dentists was only 1.69. So with marketers, we spent less to reach more and have a higher frequency. So all of that to say, we know that marketers tend to be more active on the platform than dentists. And that allows us to reach more of them at a lower cost and reach them more often. All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up so stick around. 15:42 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. All right, we have the episode all about LinkedIn's demographics and analytics. That's episode 54. You'll see all of these links down there in the show notes. There's also the episode on bidding that was not too long ago, it was episode 89. And then the episode on relevancy score. That was episode 72. Now, if you or anyone you know, is looking to learn more about LinkedIn Ads, go check out the course that I did on LinkedIn Learning. And you'll see a link down there in the show notes that takes you right there. It's by far the highest quality and the lowest cost course out there. If this is your first time listening, welcome, we're excited to have you here. Make sure to hit that subscribe button. But if this is not your first time, if you're a regular listener, please do rate and review the podcast. Most of the time, these reviews are done on Apple podcasts. So I'd encourage you to do it there. That is by far the best way that you can say thank you for us putting out this content week after week. With any questions, suggestions or corrections on what we've talked about. Reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. I'm cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Top Rank Marketing's Site Lee Odden's LinkedIn Lee Odden's Instagram Follow AJ on LinkedIn   NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Youtube Channel Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript AJ Wilcox Are you using influencer marketing community and thought leadership as part of your LinkedIn Ads strategy? We dive into these topics and more 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. Today I have a special treat for you. Lee Odden has specialized in B2B marketing for his almost entire career. And I'm grateful to call him a friend. He and I have spoken at many of the same B2B events. Although I have to admit he's oftentimes the keynote, while I'm one of the breakout speakers. But, I've always looked up to him as a mentor and a thought leader and a friend. Today, we have a wide ranging conversation covering everywhere from thought leadership to influencer marketing and building communities in B2B, and I promise as a B2B marketer, you'll get a lot out of this. I wanted to highlight a review here by Alessia Negro. She's a senior sales and marketing executive in the hospitality industry out of Dublin, Ireland. Alessia says, "Absolutely great podcast. I have learned a lot about LinkedIn from this podcast. I think whoever wants to learn LinkedIn ads should follow it." Alessia, thanks so much for the kind words. And I do agree. Although I realized I'm a bit biased. And if you're a regular listener, I want to feature you so make sure to leave a review. And I'll shout you out live here. All right. Without further ado, let's hit it. Alright, we've got Lee Odden, co founder of TopRank Marketing. Lee, thanks so much for joining us. We're super excited to have you here. Lee Odden It's great to be here, AJ. Good to see you. AJ Wilcox Alright, so first off, tell us a little bit more about yourself. Anything that I didn't cover in that rather short and sweet intro. Lee Odden I started in marketing, and basically the late 90s. I was actually got into the website sales game selling websites over the phone to small businesses, believe it or not, people would fax us their brochures and we'd make a website out of that. And then of course, people started asking how are we going to get traffic to these websites that you're making us? And that's where I learned about SEO, you know, about creating doorway pages and, you know, creating different web pages for different search engines AltaVista excite Lycos hotpot, you know, no one has heard of those. But then Google came on the scene and linking, and content became more important blogging, social media, and really, over the last 10 years really leaned into the whole idea of CO creating content with influencers. So ultimately, what we tried to do is help customers be the best answer help our clients, b2b tech companies mostly be the best answer for their customers. And it's worked out really well. And, you know, it's kind of funny, on the path from being a really small agency to serving small customers to now serving large enterprise brands. I took that advice myself, right. So I started blogging, and I started doing the kinds of things to make myself known in the industry as a magnet to the agency. You know what I mean by speaking at events and being active on social and connecting with people who were influential to make myself influential, you know, and it's been a fun ride. And when I'm not doing marketing stuff, I'm usually running running is kind of been my thing during COVID. Basically, when I'm actually training for my first marathon, which is going to happen in four weeks. So I'm pretty excited about that. Oh, that's so AJ Wilcox Exciting! Alright, so what's your preparation for the marathon look like right now? I know, you start to do a lot more mileage as you go. Are you doing like low high mileage right now? Lee Odden Yeah, my highest mileage will be tomorrow. But I did 23 miles last Saturday. And I'll probably do 23.5 or something like that tomorrow. I don't need to do much more. Because the whole race is 26. Yes. So yeah, I've been running more than 13 miles for the last seven weeks or so. I've even run a couple of half marathon races just as a workout, which is kind of a crazy idea. Because a year ago, I was wondering whether I could even run 13 miles, let alone run one quickly. And quickly is subjective quickly to me. Not quickly, compared to a lot of friends of mine that I have out there that are runners that are just smoking it, but it's a great way to get out. It's a disciplined thing. It's a lifestyle thing. Now for me, I feel odd if I haven't run that day. And so it's good for your health. And it's great to have goals, right? Yes, it's great to work towards a goal and having a commitment to a thing that takes a long time is incredibly rewarding when you've been able to reach those milestones, right? And also you connect with a community of other like minded people. And now I'm starting to get all these Instagram posts from running communities with these inside jokes about running and it's like, oh my god, this is so funny, but nobody else cares, nobody else cares. It's fun. AJ Wilcox Well, It's so fulfilling, I think to accomplish something physically, that is hard that you know, other people can't. Before a knee surgery, I used to be a runner. And so I do a half marathon every year and an Olympic trial. And I love those kinds of things. I loved accomplishing something physically, that's awesome. Plus, it gives you insight, because you're already community minded, which we'll talk into more, but it gives you something to compare and think about, as you're developing communities around an interest that people have, you can mentally I think, compare it to like, oh, for me, this is running. But for someone else this is whatever the community is. Lee Odden You know, that's really important insight. There's a lot of value in metaphor analogy, when trying to break down new or complex ideas into something familiar for people. Because in order for those ideas to be adopted, they have to be communicated in a way that people will be willing to receive. And so yeah, that's a great point running as metaphor, or, you know, overcoming challenges. A lot of people, I'm inspired by our fitness people, but what I'm inspired by them about isn't so much about the fitness it's about overcoming challenges and worldview, and, you know, being resilient and those sorts of things. AJ Wilcox Perfect. So jumping back here into B2B, how did you originally get interested in b2b? How did you land? Because my understanding is you're exclusively B2B with your clients, or do you have some VC? Lee Odden Exactly. So my agency top rank marketing did start as SEO and PR firm, I had previously mostly consumer experience in marketing doing SEO for consumer websites. And my partner, though, had been working mostly with B2B tech companies as a director of marketing, VP of marketing. And so over time, well, through her knowledge and experience, I learned a lot more about B2B. And the market was responding in terms of inbound interest in our services from B2B companies. And I have a fun story about the big leap early in our business, we were working remotely. And I was working in my unfinished basement, right. And I had a desk down there. And I got a call and someone asked me if I would come speak at their conference, this company was fortune 15 company. So I had been blogging, I spoke a little bit, people knew about me being able to talk about SEO and public relations. So that was a unique intersection. And they wanted me to come speak at their event. And I spoke one morning to their marketing people. And then they said, Come back tomorrow and talk to all of our PR people. So they were a company that was so big, they brought all their different businesses, all the marketers from their all their different businesses and had a little mini conference. And so the second day, I talked to all the PR people. And my contact said, Hey, one of our senior executives was in the room yesterday. And we wanted to know if we could engage your agency on an ongoing basis. So this is the fortune 15 company was a b2b business unit that wanted to hire us. And we were only four people I'm working out of my unfinished basement. Wow. So of course, I said, yes, absolutely, we can help you out. And we figured it out. And that was a fast track to learning about b2b and learning the language of large, complex organizations, because obviously, that's very different than working with a small or medium sized business. And that laid the groundwork for me and the people that I had to competently be able to serve other b2b companies. Right. So now, Adobe, and you know, we've had experience with companies like SAP and Oracle, I've done work for Microsoft, and a really large telecom that I cannot mention, ever, but you know, biggest one, and so on and so forth. So and LinkedIn, my God, what am I saying, we've been working with LinkedIn for gosh, almost 10 years now, providing content and SEO services. So it's been an interesting ride, and b2b is a great space, because there's so much opportunity to raise the bar, it doesn't have to mean boring, boring, there's a lot of exciting things you can do. And there's so much room for us to be able to do it with because of the longer sales cycles, emphasis on content and education and that sort of thing. AJ Wilcox Well, I'm glad you shared someof them, I get the feeling that a lot of the kinds of clients that you were with are the kind that don't want you saying that you work with them. So it's really good to understand, and from my understanding a lot of the community and many of the thought leaders within LinkedIn that we hear from, I won't say created by you that you're the one behind them, but you're kind of the inspiration there. Do you have any comment or anything to share on that? Lee Odden Well, certainly, it's one thing to make a decision that people within your company should have greater visibility that you want to grow their influence, that you want to facilitate social interaction. But it's another thing to do that with intent with intent in a way that will achieve a particular outcome. So that requires doing some homework developing a strategy and architecting Okay, exactly how are we going to execute this in a way that is best going to accomplish the goal that we're after? So it's not just about tweeting more, or doing a LinkedIn live every once in a while. It's like, okay, what's the topic? And what is the anchor topic? What are the derivative topics? What are the conversations that we can repurpose from that? Who are the content collaborators or influencers on that topic that we can connect with, not only for co creation, but distribution, and so architecting all that stuff is really where the most magic comes from. And then for some companies, we do write content for them. But like I said, a lot of the magic comes in through the strategy and the architecture of the all that, and then of course, the ongoing optimization of performance. And then of course, yeah, and then some content here and there. AJ Wilcox Beautiful. I love it. Alright, so talking about thought leadership, specifically, tell us about why B2B marketers should be investing in being seen as a thought leader. Lee Odden So if you mean is, like B2B marketer, as an executive at a company or B2B marketer, like you and me are B2B marketers. AJ Wilcox Yeah, I think a little bit of everything. I think, executives, I think the frontline workers, everyone in between, like, what's the value? Lee Odden Absolutely. So there's a lot of value in that. We all are familiar with the idea, I think Nielsen came out with this research about how people don't trust brands, and they don't trust advertising. And of course, that's been repeated, by different folks since and it still is a challenge in combination with the overwhelming amount of information available to us. I don't know about you, but my email inbox is more of a monster now than it ever was. I mean, just keeping up is crazy. The social channels and people that I follow, I made a lot of effort to craft who I curate, and listen to, but it's just overwhelming amounts of information. I can only imagine what it might be for other folks who haven't had expertise in curation, right. So being a thought leader being a source of truth, for people who are in need, and let's face it, if you're in marketing, you're in need of up to date information every day, right? Ours is a dynamic industry. And so it's super important and to be competent in our industry, it's really very important that we connect with people that are on the forefront of what's new, what's trending, what's relevant. And so being a thought leader helps you as a person who is capable of original thought, who has something to offer, because that's kind of a prerequisite here, and being able to provide value to others in the industry. So that manifests as community building. It manifests as, you know, customers coming to you saying, hey, AJ, I've been listening to your podcast, and I've heard you talk about LinkedIn ads in this way or that way. It's like, you know, we're actually now in a position to get some help. I'm sure that happens all the time. Natalie, I can tell you from personal perspective, I've had it happen. A million times, it feels like where people say, Haley, I saw you speak last week, I saw you speak 10 years ago. And this is people who want to hire my agency, because I'm when I speak, I tell stories about the work the agency does, as well as just best practices, but also people who want to work for me will say, Yeah, you know, I saw you speak, I've been following your blog. And I'm just wondering if there's an opening, oh, my goodness, this person's amazing. And they're coming to us, you know. So for other folks, if you're an executive at a company, if you want to be listened to, if you want to be relevant, it's not enough for your own brands marketing, to go and put out information you think your customers need to know, buyers are looking for sources of truth. buyers are looking for people, humans that they can relate to, that they can subscribe to, so to speak. And if you have subject matter experts, if you are a subject matter expert, and you have something to offer, then it makes sense for you to go down that thought leadership path and make a connection and create value for those folks out in the industry because you know what they desperately need it. And they're overwhelmed with other information. And so you can actually provide them a service. And guess what, what's going to come back to you is new business. What's going to come back to you is community what's going to come back to you is connection with people who can make things happen. And AJ Wilcox What I hear from you is you actually have to have something to say in order to be a thought leader. So don't strive to be a thought leader for thought leader sake. But strive to be a great business professional, a skilled expert in your field, and then take that to share with others. Lee Odden Yeah, and so there's two things I'd say too, if you don't have that yet, if you're not there yet. I feel like if you're Junior in New York career and you feel like thought leadership is in your future. Two things. One, if you don't have a lot of resources, you could document your journey towards thought leadership. And that actually could help you be a thought leader, as a junior person, you could connect with others who are already thought leaders, they could do things like interviews, you could do things like, get quotes from them, or whatever. And so you can document that journey as you are learning more and more about a particular subject matter. And, you know, hey, I experimented with this. And I found this as an outcome, or I talked to this person. And here's some insight that they shared, I noticed in the news, they're talking about this. And here's what I think about that. documenting that journey can actually help you become a thought leader. The other thing is, if you do have resources, you're at a brand. And you don't know how to do this, you can certainly hire an expert, like an agency, or a PR firm or someone like us who can help you develop a plan for thought leadership, maybe even provide some of the content. And that doesn't happen that often. But it can. AJ Wilcox That's a great point. All right. So we've talked about thought leadership as individuals, what about getting your B2B brand to be seen as a thought leadership brand? Do you have any thoughts? Lee Odden Yeah, absolutely. You know, for companies, it's a huge differentiator in a crowded marketplace to be thought of first, when companies have a problem, and they're thinking of solution providers, right. And thought leadership is something especially in B2B. But you know, in general, it's useful from a marketing PR perspective. But in B2B, especially, these are large considered purchases. So you're not just looking for the best solution, you're looking for a solution that you know, is going to be relevant, and maybe innovative and important for you in the long run. So if a brand invest in thought leadership, and what that means is you're articulating a point of view, and it's validated by third parties. So that means that industry publications and industry influencers that are validating the ideas that you're putting forth, you're putting out original research, you're pointing out points of view, you're creating opportunities for other people who are important voices and trusted voices in the industry to have conversations with your executives with people that represent your brand. And that kind of combination of information, helps people subscribe to your religion, so to speak, they subscribe to your point of view. And they start to rely in trust on you as the source of truth. So a great example is Edelman puts out the trust research. Edelman is a huge, huge agency, obviously, they have a lot of resources. But it's like, you know, you can rely on Edelman's research about how people trust brands or not, year after year, because they continue to put out that research and they have other marketing conversations around that. For our small part. You know, we put out a report on B2B influencer marketing. And it's really been a great way for people to know that there is data, thoughtfulness and expertise behind the fact that we're a source of solution when it comes to working with influencers or content in the B2B marketing space, because we are connecting with third party entities influencers and media to corroborate those ideas, right? So brands is thought leaders super important. If someone's got a problem, don't you want them to think of you first, as a solution? I totally agree. AJ Wilcox I think especially in a crowded marketplace, where you have 15 vendors that you can go to for a CRM and information security service, of course, you're gonna gravitate towards the one that you feel like you have the best relationship with. And I think that comes from the thought leadership that comes from community that comes from being a voice that people want to hear. Absolutely. So I think you've touched a little bit here on parts of the strategy. But if someone wanted to start becoming a thought leader, or having their company be seen as a thought leader, what are the steps, the components that you would tell them? Like, here's the strategy for how you actually start to implement this? Lee Odden That can be a really big answer. So I'll be succinct. If I can, I think the first thing you got to do is, you know, specify what is it that you want to be a thought leader about? There's got to be topic specificity. You can't be a thought leader about all things, right? That's just not resource practical. But you've got to identify that thing that sits at the intersection of how you want to be known and what customers are most interested in. And so be a thought leader about that thing, right? Because that represents what's in demand and relevant to your solutions. And as you make that determination, then all things flow from that. What kind of content will you create? What kind of connections will you make? What kind of cadence will you publish and interact at right? So you get an idea about the resources that are needed in order to put something like that into action, right? There's got to be some consistency and continuity of message from thought leader. So in other words, if I talk about 10 Different things over a period of time, it's like, well, yeah, he talks about a lot of stuff like I guess marketing. But if I'm talking about, you know, B2B content, B2B content marketing, b2b content marketing, I mean, I'm talking about derivative ideas around that concept. But really, it's like, wow, B2B content marketing or B2B influencer marketing, people will come to know you as that very specific thing. So you've got to have some choices made about the topic derivative topics, you've got to think about the publishing platform or platforms, you know, is it the company website, the blog, or social channel? As the center of your hub? And the spokes? Are your distribution channels? Okay, where am I going to amplify this? Am I going to amplify through email? Am I going to pull people in through ads? Am I going to do some media relations and talk about these stories with journalists in the industry? Am I going to connect with industry experts? Am I going to partner with them and collaborate with any of them on initiatives? We have what we like to call best answer strategies, how to be the best answer is really kind of a thought leadership play. And you can do things like this is a practical tactic things. Okay, so let's say you want to be the best answer for a particular thing. It's like, okay, Fast Track way to get on the radar of the most important people in the industry, about that topic is to do what we call an honoring post, right? So it's like a list where the 25 top cybersecurity experts, right, I'm a cybersecurity provider of some kind and finance, right. And so here are the top finance cybersecurity experts. I don't even know if I could find 25 of those, but I'll do my best. And then I reach out to them. And I start to create a relationship with those folks. And I'll simultaneous to that, I might do a small version research, what are the trends, what's happening, and I'll invite those folks to be a part of that research. I'll start a podcast. And as I gain momentum, I might do something like, you know, a list of disparate resources like books, conferences, communities, and so on, and so forth. So I become like this destination around the topic. And that seems like a lot of work. But guess what, there's a lot of competition. And to be the best answer, guess what you've kind of have to be the best source of information, I would just say, as far as a thought leadership strategy, whether it's just you, or whether it's your brand, you don't go it alone, that would be one of the biggest mistakes. And that's why I suggest the idea of connecting with other industry experts, and finding opportunities to collaborate with them, you can start a podcast and become a thought leader on the thing that the podcast is about, that's cool. But if you involve other people, that are also well known about that idea, and you can create collaboration opportunities that create mutual value for you and your collaborators, then everybody wins out true, not just you and the person or people you're collaborating with, but especially the audience that you're trying to attract and engage. AJ Wilcox Oh, so true. I think it's so easy. If you're, let's say scrolling through your LinkedIn feed, and you're saying, I want to be a thought leader, let me see what other people are doing. You see someone is running a live stream, and you're like, oh, maybe I need to run a weekly live stream, and then someone else is running a podcast, and then someone else is recording videos, screenshare and posting them to YouTube, you're like, oh, I have to have a YouTube channel. And when you start taking from all of these ideas, you overextend yourself, because yeah, there isn't a strategy. So what I appreciate so much about what you shared is like this actually is a specific strategy where you can put the blinders on and ignore some of the other methods that other people are doing work on your own. And then you won't overextend yourself, like you can actually do this. Lee Odden Something I learned a long time ago about, you know, being known about a thing is one element, one leg of the stool is document your success, and then duplicate. So be specific, like you're saying, be specific on a particular or very specific channel, grow community on that channel. And you'll get to a point where it's like, wow, now it makes sense for me to extend into some other channels, right. And you can duplicate what you learned in that one channel into others. And that way, you can manage resources appropriately. And you create that continuity of message. And you'll be putting forward the most effective tactics for communication, as opposed to being in a constant state of experimentation. AJ Wilcox Yes. And when you look at what everyone else is doing, a lot of times they have a team that's helping them. And so I think that you can do this all yourself, you know, by the time you've done what you've talked about, which is really building a community around one channel or one thing, by the time it's ready to start expanding into other channels and taking on more things. By that time. You've probably built up more of a team and it's a She realistic, you Lee Odden could do that. Yeah. And then just thinking of myself, I started blogging, my only thing was I just started blogging, I could not write. And I started blogging in that blogging. You know, I always made mention of other people, I was just a way to have a conversation. And then social media came on. And people that read the blog started following me on Twitter, and then LinkedIn. And then I started speaking, and then I wrote a book and you know, just grew organically 100% organically. I did have help with the book. But with the rest, I publish all my own social stuff, I do all my own speaking stuff. And so it does make sense, at least in my case to branch out, you can get help to facilitate and expedite that stuff. But as an individual person, I think topics specificity specific channel is a great thing to get started with and expand from there. AJ Wilcox Oh, amen to that. Here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive 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. You want a return on some of that investment? 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 that 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 or official LinkedIn partners. Just navigate on over to B2Linked.com/apply. And we'd absolutely love the chance to get to work with you. All right, let's jump back into the interview with Leo. Alright, so let's shift gears now talking about influencer marketing, because I know you've done a lot with influencers. We probably see a lot of influencers in b2c we have for a long time, hate actors and celebrity involvement. But in B2B, I think this is a little fresher. And I think a little bit more new. What can you tell us about how B2B marketers should be thinking about leveraging influencers in B2B? Lee Odden We're kind of in a do more with less age, right? There's a lot of marketers pulling back right now B2B tech especially. And, you know, a lot of folks are looking for what are the most effective things I can be doing? Because the demands on delivering on mid to end to funnel KPIs, you know, forget about brand, right, are really high on people's lists. Well, the B2B Institute at LinkedIn did some research. And they found that at any given time, 95% of buyers are not in market, they're out market, right for any solution and only 5% are in a position like, yeah, we need a solution. And so that's not changed. Well, why influencers? Well, here's the thing, you know, you've got factors that are working against you, as a marketer, in this environment where you got to do more with less, we've got to produce, we've got to get results, we've got to react to this economic environment that we're in. And people are as buyers, you know, they are confronted with this information overload that we talked about before they are struggling to find single sources of truth. Who do they trust, they don't trust advertising. They don't trust brands a lot of the time, but they do trust people, they trust people that they follow. And so the idea of what would happen if you're able to connect with the most trusted voices in your industry? What if you're able to collaborate with them on creating content that was super targeted, super valuable to your buyers, and you're able to build a community of subscribers to a regular cadence of that kind of content, imagine how much more effective you'd be at reaching buyers that are actually going to pay attention, versus, you know, singularly relying on interruptive types of communications, right. And so influencers can play a very important role, not for everybody, but for a lot of companies that want to break through and want to attract and engage with buyers, that are really relying on industry experts that are influenced by people who are the thought leaders in the industry, right? And so there are very effective ways in which marketing programs can be put forward, that are creating content of value, of course, but our collaborations with these industry experts, so it's not just like every influencer is the same. It's not like I'm gonna think of a B2B marketing influencer and handling right? And Haley's, a wonderful, wonderful human being. But just because an Hanley is in a piece of ebook that we make or a video we make doesn't mean that's going to solve all problems. And handle is really broadly known as a very unique individual. She has both broad popularity, and she's actually super competent about her discipline. And so she's a unicorn in that way. So she's actually going to help satisfy bringing people in that don't haven't even heard of you, and actually start to consider you because she has that discipline, competency, about copywriting about content marketing, and that sort of stuff. But not all influencers are like that. So it's not just about working with influencers, it's about okay, how do we pair the right kinds of influencers for different stages of the buying cycle, for example, you know, the most popular influencers, those, you know, the pro influencers, they're doing keynotes. They're publishing books all the time. They're professionally famous in the B2B world, in their respective industry. Those are people you use to attract top of funnel types of outcomes. But then you work with people who are actual practitioners in an area, they can actually speak authoritatively on the discipline. So whether they're super user, whether they're a customer, or whatever, for those middle end to funnel types of content, assets, right. So you kind of line things up. So influencers are important, because everyone is influential, but everyone is influenced on a daily basis in some way. And you can architect programs that not only make your brand more relevant, and more credible, and can reach people that you're not reaching with your ads. But over time, you can build relationships with these most trusted voices in your industry in a way that they are starting to organically advocate for you. And that's priceless, right most valuable form of advertising word of mouth, if you can facilitate that as priceless. Oh, totally true. AJ Wilcox I have noticed in B2C influencers, usually they're paid off in some way. But in B2B, I see a lot of influencers, gotten through collaboration opportunities, and a lot of times money doesn't even have to exchange hands, you're doing something that's mutually beneficial to both of these companies are influencers audiences. Yeah, and you know, that's becoming more of an art to achieve that. Lee Odden So we started doing influencer marketing for B2B brands back in 2012. So back then, yes, it was true that the vast majority of influencer engagements were what we call organic. In the case of B2B influencer marketing, most of the influencers are contributing to content that lives on the brand channels. So if a person who's really well known in their particular subject matter area, could be seen in combination with a major brand, that's really credibility building for them, right. So they're creating influence for each other in that way. And so they'd be happy to do it for free, so to speak, obviously, it has to do with the ask too, if I ask someone for a quote, you know, no problem. But if I asked someone to write me 1000 word article, these days, that's probably going to cost something if I want them to write an article every month, that's gonna cost something. So it used to be maybe 90%, were organic 10% were paid way back in the day. Nowadays, it's like 60/40 60% might be organic activations, and 40% are paid. And that paid number is going up and up and up, as more people who are influential in the B2B space are creating media properties for themselves, right, they've got a really established podcast, they're part of a network of podcasts, you know, they're a blogger, or increasingly video assets of some kind, right? And so they're able to not only just say one nice thing about the brand, but they're actually able to put together a package of social distribution and content assets and this and that we're even, you know, do reports, and so on and so forth. So it's great, though, to have that mutual value, it's important to find something that you have in common with the influencer. And in some cases, they may want to contribute, because it's an easy Ask, and it aligns with what they want to do, and it doesn't cost you anything. And it could be that's the first thing you do. But then you might follow up and say, Wow, that was amazing. We'd really like to do to do this more robust thing, how much would that cost? And they're going to appreciate that. And trust me, when you pay an influencer. It's awesome, of course, for the influencer, but it's awesome for your brand, because now you've hired them. They are accountable to delivering to a specification. Whereas if you engage with people organically, and they say, Yeah, sure, I'll give you that thing by next Thursday. And if they don't, you have no recourse. You can't count on it. Right. They're not signing an agreement. So paying influencers is actually a really good thing. It's up to you to negotiate and to do your due diligence as far as who they are and their ability to deliver and have impact. AJ Wilcox Beautiful. I want to switch gears to talking about community because we've mentioned community several times. Yeah, you've put a lot of value and community over your career here in B2B, what role do you see communities playing in B2B. Lee Odden community is hugely important, I think because so many buyers are going to rely on their peers for recommendations. I mean, think you've probably had it happen I know I have. It's like, we go to remote work, and we need a new phone system that we can work, you know, so I don't know who to go to. So I asked a friend of mine, I go to a group community that I'm part of, and I say, Hey, does anybody know what's a good phone system? And this isn't real. But you know, I'm thinking of a silly example. And this happens every day. Right? And so being present with a community is important for b2b because it helps make you relevant, right? I talked about that expression being the best answer, right? Being a thought leader, being first choice means being where your customers are. And certainly your customers are part of different communities. So you have a couple of choices. You can be present in communities where your customers are, and you can exchange value, you can be a participant and you know, answer questions and interact or whatever your salespeople can or whoever, or you could create communities, right, you could say, Look, you know, we see that there's a common interest here, there's something that we can solve for. And it's not something we can do by ourselves. Why don't you join us at helping solve this problem together? Or why don't you join us on this journey to making our industry a better place, we actually are at the beginning of building a community around elevate b2b, right, elevate b2b marketing. And you know, we want to make b2b marketing a better place. And there are different messaging pillars that go along with that marketing, that is more experiential marketing, that is more inclusive, marketing that is more focused on connection, right community building, that sort of thing. So community is super important, I think, to be relevant, to be relevant. And first choice to customers in spaces where they're actually spending time. And where there can be a value exchange, right? It's one thing to provide useful content or utility to your customers through content marketing. It's another thing for you to create a place where as a brand, where your customers can connect with you, but also they can connect with each other. And there's a lot of momentum that can come from that. So I think community is super important. And when it comes to influencer marketing, same thing, you can engage with influencers on an individual basis, and that's fine. But when you can create a community of influencers that can connect with each other, in the context of your brand is solving Wow, now you have something really powerful right, that you can go to market with. And that can have a much bigger impact than these little one off campaigns, people are kind of dipping their toe in the water with here and there. Perfect. AJ Wilcox Alright, so lead, tell us what are those components to creating a community, especially as we're thinking about it for b2b? Lee Odden So as I mentioned, with, you know, thought leadership, I think that idea of topics specificity? Well, it's around the problems that you're trying to solve for, or the things that you stand for, that would be best served by the community. Right? So what's the glue that's going to hold this community together? What is the common interest that they have that aligns with that intersection of what it is that you stand for as a brand? And what's interesting to your customers, right? You also have to define who's going to be part of this community? How is the community get a function? There are other practical questions to be answered? Like, what platform are you going to use? And who are going to be your champions and your moderators? And what are the goals that you have for the community in terms of messaging penetration, in terms of size, in terms of engagement, and ultimately, you have to be accountable to some sort of ROI, right? And with any marketing initiative, those things all need to be defined, right? So sometimes community can start very intentionally. Yeah, there's communities is starting all the time where people just start in a LinkedIn, LinkedIn group or Facebook group or something like that. And it's just like, hey, and they invite a couple of other people who have a common interest. And it just starts organically and they start inviting, who do you know, that we can invite into this community and so on and so forth, or community could be an extension of an event? I think about marketing profs, and their marketing community, right, or Content Marketing Institute, has a whole community, but they also have an event, right? There's a marketing conference called PubCon that's been around. It's an SEO conference been around forever. And there's absolutely a community, you know, that is tied to that event where people you know, get to actually meet in person. So, you have to make choices about what is the purpose of the community, what are the topics that You're gonna cover what problems you're going to try and solve. And then you gotta identify some champions, some people who are going to help facilitate conversations, there's technology choices to make. And then obviously, you got to set up what kind of goals you're trying to achieve, not just for yourself, but the goals for the community itself. Well, selfishly, this AJ Wilcox is an awesome conversation, because we're actually just getting ready to launch our LinkedIn ads, courses and community all together. And so I'm paying special attention here. So thanks for the free advice. What are some of the phases that you'd actually go through in building and then scaling the community app? What should we keep in mind as we actually go to build this? Lee Odden Well, you know, again, you've got to think about some sort of milestone goals. Maybe the first phase is simply, you know, creating the architecture of the community. And as it relates to the major topics, the subtopics, and getting people involved that represent relevance and interest around those topics, inviting them to be actually be a part and then you've got to decide, okay, what are we going to offer them, right? You're so you're offering courses? Or you're offering opportunities for roundtables or discussions? Are you giving them visibility opportunities, and, you know, set some goals for that first milestone of having a certain level of participation. Maybe your first phase is very private. And no one knows about it, except, you know, those early invitees. And we've seen this demonstrated by the social networks that have all popped up all over the place over the last 20 years, or 15 years. And then maybe once you get to a certain threshold or milestone of participation, then you open it up, you know, more publicly as a phase out. And this is what I've observed being successful. One thing though, that, I think what happens is, there's a lot of excitement about anything new. And it's going to be really important to keep that excitement alive. And so you've got to allocate resources to a community manager, or managers that are not only going to be moderating stuff, but are going to be paying attention to what's the ebb and flow from a topic interest standpoint, from a content format standpoint, and adjusting and optimizing. Because if you do the same stuff, six months or a year into your community, it's probably going to peter out, right? If you're not responsive to where the community is growing and showing interest, you're, you're going to lose them probably. So hopefully, I think that's something to look forward to. That's something to anticipate from a face standpoint, maybe, you know, not every community has to start as an exclusive thing. That seems to work really well, though. And then it evolves into an inclusive thing, as there's something of more substance for people to experience, once you open the doors to all. I love it. AJ Wilcox Haley, just kind of off the wall question here for you specifically about LinkedIn ads. I mean, we've talked about communities, we've talked about thought leadership and influencers. One of the new features that's going to be coming out here in the next I would estimate one to three months that LinkedIn has are these thought leadership ads, where we're going to be able to boost personal posts, rather than rely on boosting or creating posts that come from the company for something like this coming out. What role do you see this playing? Do you have any feedback or thoughts or advice for us marketers? In thinking about the new ad format? Lee Odden I'm super excited about that. Because we know that things can get lost in the stream, but not so much about being able to put money behind a thought leadership posts for an individual. It's just like, you know, the targeting, how can we make sure how can we increase our ability for people that we want to see this thought leadership content? Well, other than through a feature like this, right. So I think that's super, super important. And, you know, we've already talked about the importance of individual thought leadership. And by the way, we did some research in our influencer marketing report about the value of executive influence and executive thought leadership at 65% of the companies that were engaging with building their executives, as thought leaders, said that that effort elevated the influence of the brand itself, right. So something like this being able to augment organic content at the individual level with LinkedIn thought leadership ads. Excellent, excellent opportunity. And, again, it'll really help people be able to be a little more intentional and targeted about what's showing up to who, and I think will really give those advertisers a big advantage over those who are relying on just the organic visibility that happens when you post normally I AJ Wilcox love that. All right, so final switch of gears here. What are you most excited about professionally right now? I'd love to ask the same question about what are you most excited about personally? Lee Odden Well, professionally, you know, we are celebrating our 22nd year in business this year. So that's amazing. That is amazing. Wow. And, you know, we made some strategic hires recently in marketing and sales. And we're launching a fresh brand fresh brand new website and blog will be launching with hundreds and hundreds of articles on content, search and influence, and a lot of really cool features, but a really well architected brand, and messaging and all that stuff. So I'm super excited about it. We haven't launched a new website in 10, fit 12 years, and we haven't really had a professional brand engagement with like a branding agency ever, never ever. So I'm super excited about that. Launching for influencer marketing here, late summer, and lots of other things happening. So I'm super excited about that great team. Yeah, an even bigger things plan that can't even talk about later on this year. So I'm super excited about that. I'd say at the intersection of personal and professional, I get to speak at a conference, the biggest conference for b2b in France, next month in Paris. Wow. And then a week later, I get to speak at the largest b2b conference in the UK, in London. So I'm super excited about that. And then I get to visit a client of ours in Geneva in between. So you know, that's pretty awesome. Get to do a little travel, get to do a little business abroad. And there you go. AJ Wilcox That's a lot to be excited about. All right. So I've caught a couple of the resources that you've kind of mentioned here. You talked about the Elevate b2b marketing community, you've talked about your influencer marketing report, I will put the links to those down below in the show notes for anyone. But as for resources, what would you like this LinkedIn ads audience to do what you want them to come follow you contact you in some way? Join the community, download a report, like, what do you have that we should be paying attention to? Lee Odden Absolutely check out top rank marketing.com. Our blog is there as well. With those actually, it's more than hundreds, it's 1000s of articles. But it's probably in the hundreds of those that are most recent and relevant. Yeah, toprank marketing.com, people obviously can connect with me on the socials, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, to see all the crazy food that I eat and all the running that I'm doing and other thing and travel especially, that's always fun, le e o d, d, e n. Yeah. And that's where we're going to announce our report. And we've got a enterprise brand, influencer marketing report coming out very, very quickly, we have a search intent report that's out already. So lots of fun resources there. And also, I have to say, if you're in the LinkedIn ads audience, if you're not already, you've got to be subscribing to the LinkedIn marketing blog. The LinkedIn ads blog, for sure. Also, in the LinkedIn Collective is another great resource over at LinkedIn. That's a great example of LinkedIn, own thought leadership. And of course, the b2b Institute is another great resource at LinkedIn. And you know, my disclaimer is that yes, LinkedIn is a client. But these are resources I, myself personally, rely on quite a bit. AJ Wilcox Perfect. Well, Lee, thank you so much for sharing your mountain of knowledge here. I'm grateful to get to hear it. Everyone, please go follow Lea, check out the resources that he and his company have come up with Lee, thanks again so much. And we'd love to have you on for around two sometime down the road. Super. Thanks, AJ, I appreciate it. 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. AJ Wilcox All right, like we talked about with Lee, if you go to his site, top rank marketing.com. And we have links to that down in the show notes. You can get access to everything, all the reports and everything he was talking about. You'll also see his three social media handles there in the show notes, his LinkedIn, his Twitter and his Instagram links. So go follow him stay caught up on what he's doing. He's constantly sharing gold. I'm telling you, if you or anyone you know, is looking to learn more about LinkedIn ads, check out the course that I did on LinkedIn learning all about LinkedIn ads. It's by far the lowest cost and the highest production value course that there is out there. If this is your first time listening, welcome. Thanks for coming. Make sure to hit that subscribe button if you've liked what you've heard. If this is not your first time listening, though, please do go and rate and review us. Usually it's Apple podcasts, but anywhere where you can leave a review. That is by far the best way that you can say thanks for us putting out this content week after week with any questions, suggestions or corrections about what we talked about here, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Reporting Episode Bidding Episode   Follow AJ on LinkedIn NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Youtube Channel Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript Have you used LinkedIn Ads to recruit employees? You mean it's not just for B2B marketing? Yeah, we're talking about white collar recruitment 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. So Thomas Veraar, who is one of our loyal listeners, he's also a LinkedIn rep out of Bulgaria, he reached out and suggested we talk about this topic. And it's a really important topic, because it's one that gets overlooked regularly. LinkedIn themselves in their marketing have gone all in on B2B. So these alternate cases where it's technically B2C, they don't really get much attention. Well, that changes today. We're gonna go over recruiting and hiring. We'll cover why it's great to do on LinkedIn Ads, and exactly how to execute campaigns like this. First up, we have the news. Our last episode was all about the ad rotation settings and we had a listener, Laura Seery​, who's the Senior Social Media Strategist out of the Marketing Practice in Seattle, Washington, she reached out and said, "I use rotate ads evenly for a week or so when adding new creatives to an existing campaign to give them a fair shake up against the top performing ads that were already there and let the algorithm learn about these new ads. Not sure how effective the strategy is, but it's what I've always done." And, Laura, I want to thank you, that's a really cool use of even ad rotation. As you know, one of the biggest problems with the LinkedIn ad auction is that existing ad creatives are weighted much heavier in the auction, because their performance is already known to LinkedIn. And it's less risky to keep showing ads that you've already shown before. So your usage here is actually really smart. It allows you to keep running existing creatives that have performed well and test something new into them. That said, I generally recommend against this, because when you launch new ad creatives, if there's anything detracting from them, you won't get data as fast. So my personal recommendation would always be to pause previous creatives when you launch new ones. But if you don't want to do that, yours is actually the perfect approach. And as a reminder to everyone, please reach out to us I share the email address Podcast@B2Linked.com all the time on here, and I want you to use it. Reach out, let us know what you're thinking about episodes. Let me know if there's anything I missed. I also want to congratulate LinkedIn and their employees. Many of you may not know but May 5th this year, LinkedIn celebrated 20 years in business. So so cool. And Eric from our team, noticed that there was a layout change in the campaign creation process. As you go to select an objective, there are prettier buttons and icons that kind of draw your attention to what objective you're going to care about most. And then when you get down to the ad formats, where you get to choose those, the buttons and icons are prettier there, too. So very cool, doesn't change the functionality at all. But hopefully, it's going to be a lot easier to draw our attention to the objective and the ad format that we want. drewva left a review on Apple podcast that says, "New to B2B marketing. I run a services firm that's beginning our journey into the B2B Digital Marketing. AJs podcast has been a great source of learning and ideas. My entire marketing team is listening and using his techniques. We really appreciate the knowledge and value he is sharing. Thank you, AJ." Well, Drew, I absolutely appreciate you sharing it with your team, the tips and tricks and secrets that I'm sharing. I absolutely love it when you share it with others. So thank you for the awesome review. And thanks for sharing it with your team and getting everyone listening. And everyone else I want to feature you here on the podcast as well. So leave us a review on Apple podcasts and I'd love to shout you out. Alright, with that being said, let's hit it. We're talking about why LinkedIn Ads is actually good for recruiting? Well, first of all, LinkedIn really is at the core, a hiring platform. And I tend to fight against this concept a bit, because it's a great platform to spend time and to learn and to grow professionally. But I can't argue that it really started out as a job platform. In fact, up until 2013, when the newsfeed rolled out, it was only then that in my mind it legitimately became a place that you could actually spend time and interact socially. That was really when it actually became a social media platform in my mind. I recently had a friend reach out who was part of a reduction in force. He was let go from his company. And I got a chance to give him some advice for things that he could do on LinkedIn to help him find his next gig. And I couldn't stop thinking about how much more effective it would have been for him to be active on LinkedIn already. And then it's so much easier to find the right gig when you have a strong network and following. One of my favorite podcasters out there, Jordan Harbinger, he runs the Jordan Harbinger show. In every episode, he says, "Dig that well before you get thirsty" and I think this is a great analogy. Be active on LinkedIn. Build a personal and social brand so that when you need it, it's there. It's a lot harder to after the fact and say, oops, now's the time when I need a job, I better go start getting active on LinkedIn. And there are some great hiring platforms out there and we've had the opportunity to work with many of them as clients. But none of them are as much of a no brainer to go to as LinkedIn when you're looking to hire. This may not surprise many of you, but LinkedIn has a whole recruiter side of their business and it actually makes up the biggest part of LinkedIn is revenue. Before Microsoft's acquisition of LinkedIn, I used to listen to the quarterly earnings calls. And it stayed pretty steady, where LinkedIn revenue was made up about 60% by their recruiter side of the business. And then the ads business made up about 20 to 22%. And then 20%, more for Sales Navigator side of the business. So early days, that means that recruiter got a lot of LinkedIn's attention. And it got the majority of the development and new features and all of that. So what is LinkedIn recruiter? Many of us may not know. Well, it's an upgraded profile that recruiters can use to reach out and find people and ask if they'd be interested in exploring an employment opportunity. And as part of some of those LinkedIn recruiter packages, you also get some advertising spend, and ads management as part of it. And if you're curious, this is actually where dynamic ads came from. They used to be an ad format that were specifically for recruiter and you may have seen some of them They put your picture in the ad, and they say, picture yourself at x company. And then Marketing Solutions got a hold of the ad format so now we can use them as spotlight ads and company follower ads. And we've gotten to see many of these campaigns. And if I'm being honest, they're really not great. Usually, they select all the defaults, which we talk about regularly not being a good idea. And I get the feeling that the employees who actually build these campaigns don't have a lot of real advertising experience on the platform. It makes sense if they spend most of their time in recruiter, they're probably not ads people. Too many times to count, we've built competing campaigns to aid in recruiting and ours have always outperformed. So I feel pretty confident in saying that you as a marketer, you're probably going to outperform your internal recruiters and your HR department by following the tips that I'm giving you today. Those of you who are recruiter users, you'll notice that there's some additional functionality for you in campaign manager now, like you have a whole objective called job applicants that we don't really get to use. There are some other things in there as well, but we won't get into it. So let's talk specifically about recruiter and why it's good. One big plus that you have with recruiter is that the focus is on reaching those who are actively looking for a job. We call these active job seekers. And this makes sense. These are existing people who want what it is that you're advertising, and you're giving it to them, and they convert, pretty cool. I will say though, one of my favorite parts about using LinkedIn Ads is we can actually reach people who aren't the active job seekers. And let me explain. The ones who aren't active we call them passive candidates and passive candidates are gold. With active candidates, there's always this question about why they're currently unemployed. Is it possible that they're difficult to work with or unproductive, or really any of those fears, and please don't misunderstand me saying that active candidates are bad, and they're not worth considering. They're definitely not. There's absolute gold there. It's just that with these passive candidates, we get around a lot of these potential concerns, because we know that someone is already gainfully employed, and they're passively considering their next gig. So if you go and make an offer to a passive candidate, lots of times, you're the only one that they're considering, and you don't have to be bidding against anyone. As opposed to active job seekers, if they've been searching for a while, they probably have many other irons in the fire, so to speak. So you'll be competing with a lot of other potential employers when you give them an offer. And if you do actually want to reach active candidates, you can do that, too. There's a trait inside of LinkedIn Ads that allows you to reach those who are active job seekers. So you really can get the best of both worlds. Some campaigns targeting just passive and others targeting just active candidates. So there's some awesome stuff about LinkedIn Ads. Native to the targeting, it allows us to target those who already have the right skills that would make them the perfect candidate for the job that we're recruiting for. And you can also target the geography they have to be in this certain metro area. Plus, we can even target past job titles and past companies they've worked with, it really is ideal. Plus, the dirty little secret here is that recruiting is really a bottom of funnel kind of offer so it shouldn't work well to cold audiences. But because the outcome is a step up in someone's career, people actually respond really well. All, we tend to see high conversion rates, along with higher candidate quality that you just can't get with other platforms. So that's why I love using LinkedIn Ads for recruiting so much. Alright, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into exactly how to execute hiring campaigns on LinkedIn. 10:16 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. Want some of that back? Consider booking a discovery call with B2Linked.com, 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 that 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 B2linkedin.com/apply, answer a few questions, and we'd be excited to get to talk to you. Alright, let's jump into exactly how to go and execute these hiring campaigns. Execution here can be really simple. You just create a campaign that is targeting those with the skills and experience that you would require in a candidate. And your messaging can be pretty simple, too. The message could say something as simple as, "Hey, you look qualified for this position do you want to apply?" You can lead them to a job posting and collect resumes there, but we can go into more detail here about the options you have. First off in targeting, this depends a lot on how many applicants that you need, and how widespread the skills are that you're looking for. You can even consider how wide is this talent pool. So you can decide if you want to target very tight or a lot more broad. For instance, if I were looking for a highly technical role in my home state of Utah, and I can tell you that there are only like 2,000 people who fit that criteria, I'm probably going to target tightly around that specific technical skill set. And I'll know because the audience is small, I'm probably only going to get a handful of applicants for it. Or maybe I'm looking for something like a marketing manager who can work remotely, I can then broaden my targeting to 10s, or hundreds of 1000s, maybe even millions. And I might be able to expect a flood of applicants, and I won't have to bid as high to fill my budget there, too. I can also do a slow drip out to my ideal potential employees and get a slow and steady stream of applicants. This is really helpful for those companies who are always hiring, they're always looking for good talent, you can just have the steady drip going on, that keeps bringing you great candidates. When I'm targeting wide, I like to use job function plus seniority, plus, obviously geography. If that's too broad, you can tighten this up a little bit by layering on a skill, or groups, or interests. You may even want to layer on years of experience here. If however, you want to start doing some tight targeting, I really like to use job title plus geo. And you can even get that one tighter by requiring specific past employers or past job titles. And you can always use years of experience here as well. Did I miss any targeting tricks? Reach out to us at Podcast@B2linked.com. With how you actually message this, it can really be simple it can be whatever you want to say. I'd suggest messaging and an ad format that makes the job feel special and makes the candidate feel special that you'd be considering them as well. Initially, I'm thinking probably single image ads probably make the most sense. But I've seen a lot of recruiting also happen with text ads. So really, you can't go wrong with whichever ad format you choose. Let's talk about the landing page experience. Because this is probably the most important part. If you send a potential candidate to your normal job requisition page that has a bunch of fine print that's legally required, like must be able to lift 10 pounds and work in a dimly lit environment, then you've probably ruined the whole experience. It looks the same as everyone else's position and now you're being considered just like they would consider everyone else's positions. Instead, consider this, you can definitely send to a page that has the traditional upload your cover letter and upload your resume. But that won't perform as well as a page that makes the position feel special. And if you're treating it more like lead generation than as a job application, it's really going to stand out. Think maybe something like a page that has a video showcasing cool elements of your company culture. And maybe the hiring manager talking about the impact that this position is going to have. That kind of approach is really going to make your job stand out. And you could even use native lead gen forms to make the application process a little bit more simple, a little bit less friction prone. Maybe something like submit your name and email and we'll get back to you to schedule a conversation. I wanted to share a really cool example of recruiting campaigns on LinkedIn to really show you what's possible on the platform. We've gotten to implement this approach at real scale and we've spent over $30 million hiring on the platform. So I hope you'll geek out with me for a minute to see what's possible. We helped a particular hiring platform acquire candidates a few years back. They were specifically hiring software engineers. But there are so many different kinds of engineers out there. There's Python, there's Backend, there's Front end, C++, Java, etc. So we built out a campaign for each programming specialty. Let's say there's 20 of those, but then we have three different ways that we can reach each of those developers. We can reach them by their job title, like Ruby Developer, we can reach them by something like a skill, like a Ruby on Rails skill. And we can also reach those who are in Ruby development groups. So now you do the multiplication and now we have 60 campaigns. But then we also had different geographies that we can target these top 10 cities that were mostly hiring these developers. So we broke all that out. So now we have 600 campaigns, but it didn't stop there. Then we had different ad formats that we wanted to be able to use, we had text ads, we had sponsored content, dynamic ads, and sponsored messaging. So we built each one of these campaigns inside of each one of those ad formats. So now, if you do the math, there's 2400 campaigns. And in the process of this, we found that the limit that campaign manager allows in an account was a bit over 1200 campaigns. The way we decided to do it was one account per ad format. So it was a lot of campaigns to manage. It was definitely a lot of ads, especially when we had to refresh ad creative once a month. But what this allowed us to do was to make micro adjustments at real scale. And it gave us incredible control over the account and the efficiency metrics. If the client all of a sudden came to us and said that database developers are not in demand right now, no problem, we just shut all of the campaigns off that we're going after database people. If they came to us and said that demand for C++ developers was higher this week than it was last, we could go in and raise budgets, maybe 10% for each of the campaigns that were targeting C++ developers, and we can raise our bids a bit on them, too. At any time, we could go and pull data from LinkedIn and see based on click through rates, which programming discipline was most in demand that week, we could also determine quickly what level of competition was required to reach each of these specialties by looking at the CPCs. Or even looking at the floor bids for each of them. All of this is very quickly done with a pivot table in Excel. And if you're curious about that, go check out episode 69. That was all about reporting outside of campaign managers platform. So this wouldn't be complete without telling you what to avoid and what not to do. First off, your position still has to be an interesting and competitive and alluring proposition. Don't think that just because you're advertising it on LinkedIn, that you can include a position with fewer benefits and noncompetitive pay, and somehow candidates are still going to come out of the woodwork. Advertising is always pouring fuel on a fire. And if there's no fire to begin with, adding fuel just creates a flammable puddle on the ground. A big thanks to Dennis Yu for this analogy that I still think of and use all the time. But when the fire is already burning hot, pouring more fuel on, it just is going to make it a lot more impressive. We've covered this already, but don't send traffic to a boring job rack, try to make the position feel special. And as always don't use audience expansion. It's just going to extend your reach to those who wouldn't actually make great candidates. Make sure you're bidding properly. Go back to Episode 89 all about bidding. The same exact approach is going to work here in recruiting as it does on B2B advertising. And really don't do the stuff that I would normally tell you not to do all advertising on LinkedIn because it is so similar. All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around 19:11 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. All right, here's your resources. For this episode. We have the reporting episode ahat was episode 69. You'll see that in the show notes as well. We also just mentioned the bidding episode that was episode 89. Just a few back but if you or anyone you know is looking to learn more about LinkedIn Ads, have them check out the course that I did on LinkedIn Learning with LinkedIn. It's by far the lowest cost and the highest quality course out there at the moment. If this is your first time listening, welcome! We're excited to have you here! If you like what you heard, hit that subscribe button. But if this is not your first time listening, if you are already a subscriber, please do me the honor of going out and reviewing us, especially on Apple podcasts. But I have heard some people reviewing us on Spotify as well. And I'd love to shout you out for doing that. With any questions, suggestions, or corrections on anything that I've purported to have said, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com.. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: AJ's post describing how AB testing tool works Episode on AB testing Follow AJ on LinkedIn NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Youtube Channel Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript Ad rotation settings on LinkedIn Ads. Should you rotate your ads evenly to get better data for your AB tests or leave on optimized for performance? It's a trick question. And we'll cover exactly why 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! As most modern ad platforms do, LinkedIn has an ad rotation setting that at first glance appears very intelligent to use, but it's not. And we're going to talk today about why. I'll even share with you why I call this the "charge me more and show me less button". In ad rotation, there are two different options. There's the default called optimized for performance. And then there's one called rotate ads evenly. I want to love rotate evenly because we're always testing. But it is rarely the best option to use and we'll cover why. First off in the news, Shae on our team brought to my attention a new rollout called comparison metrics. And I've noticed this in many of my accounts, since what it is, is when you choose your time range, you can choose the comparison range as well. So if you're looking at the last week, it'll automatically show you the changes from the previous week, along with percent changes next to each metric. So in the screenshot that Shae took for us, I can see that spend was up 37%, and visits were up 23.9% and costs were up 18%. So in this screenshot that Shae gave us, I can see that in the past seven days for this client, our spend is down 37% visits are only down 23%, which shows cost savings. Cost per click was down 18% and number of impressions were only down 11 and a half percent. It's hardly what I would call a game changer, but this kind of data can be really helpful just for understanding what's my performance doing over time. And being able to see that right within the platform. I applaud LinkedIn for coming out with changes like this. I wanted to highlight a couple reviews. We have DenisefromCumbria, and Denise I'm sorry, I can't figure out who you are on LinkedIn, just searching for Denise and Cumbria. But she said, "At last LinkedIn ads takes the floor. AJ is an expert in the space and then sharing some detailed information here. Episode One is packed with detail". Denise, thank you so much. I sincerely try to pack every episode with detail. So I do hope you're still a listener, we'd love to give you a shout out there. And if I can find out who you are, I'll shout you out by your full name and title and all that. Then we have username CGProverb, CG says, "A fantastic source of information five stars. I recently found this podcast when AJ was interviewed on another marketing podcast I follow. I have to say, after only listening to a few episodes, the content is invaluable. I am hooked. Thanks, AJ, for sharing this with us." CG, I'm so glad to have you hooked. Thanks for listening. Same goes to you. If you want to reach out to me and let me know who you are, I'd love to shout you out full name and title and company on all that. Okay, back to the topic at hand. Let's hit it. So we get asked a lot about the rotate ads evenly option versus the optimized for performance option. And I first started playing with this feature back in 2011. And like I mentioned in the intro, I really wanted to love it because I'm always running an AB test. So of course, I would want both of my ads, or maybe even all four of my ads to be shown evenly. So I can tell which one is getting a better click through rate. As we know with the way that LinkedIn ads works, when you launch, let's say two ads in a campaign, one is probably going to get a significant amount of impressions more than the other. So I wanted to even that out. So I started testing this and I actually started out testing it at a large scale. And I'm really glad that I was spending hundreds of 1000s on this test, because it allowed me to see the impact very quickly. And now I'm sharing this impact with you. Every single time I turned on this option, I noticed the same thing happened, impressions would drop. And this is significant. And my effective cost per click, no matter how I was bidding, would increase significantly. At the time, I had to go to my LinkedIn reps and ask what is going on here? Why would this be happening? But then LinkedIn and later years have come out and actually changed the definition of what this option is. So if you open up campaign manager, you have to actually go into editing one of your campaigns, and then get to the ad step. And right at the top of the page as you're seeing your ads. It'll say ads in this campaign, and there's a little cog, a little wheel. And as you click it, you'll see the two different ad rotation options. The definition for optimized for performance, it says recommended and I also recommend this, it says this option delivers impressions to the creatives evenly at first to learn which creative performs best, then more impressions will be delivered to the creatives with the best performance. Then when you read the definition for rotate ads evenly, it says, this has a nice clue in it, "this option enters each creative into the auction evenly", I added a little bit of emphasis here, "giving the ad a fair opportunity to compete for an impression without taking performance into account". So if you read into this enough, you'll understand why this is actually deleterious for your performance. What's happening is it's not showing each ad evenly to your audience, what it's doing is it's entering each ad evenly into the auction. But the auction is very strict. With the auction, better performance wins. And worse, performance gets hammered. What's actually happening here, let's say you have one ad that has a relevancy score of seven, and another one that has a relevancy score of five, both ads are getting entered into the auction evenly. That's exactly what it says it's going to do. But the ad with a relevancy score of seven is going to win more auctions every time it's put into the auction. And it's going to win it at a better rate. So maybe your effective cost per click from this ad is going to be $10. But what about the ad with a relevancy score of four, it's entered into the auction just as often as the other ad. But because it only has a relevancy score of four, it's going to lose most of the auctions it's put in there against. But when it does when you're going to pay a significant premium, because the ad has a poor relevancy score. So when you run these auctions, one after another over and over, you start to see that you've lost a lot of impressions, because you were entering a loser into the auction just as often. And the times when those ads do win the auction, your prices went up, and you had to pay significantly more for them. So this is why I call this option the charge me more and show me less. This is not great dynamics. And because of this, I don't recommend this option for most advertisers. There are limited cases where we do recommend though, and we'll get into those right here after the break. 7:10 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 investment? Consider booking a discovery call with B2Linked, the original LinkedIn Ads performance agency. We've worked with some of the largest LinkedIn 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 could. Plus, we're official LinkedIn partners. Just go to B2Linked.com/apply, we'd absolutely love the chance to get to work together. Alright, let's jump back into the cases where we might actually recommend even ad rotation. And I know a lot of times what we tell you is don't listen to LinkedIn recommendations, because they're not always in your favor. But in this case, LinkedIn is actually really clued in. You'll notice that optimized for performance is the default ad rotation setting on most ad formats. And it used to be actually for all ad formats. The one that I would pick out was sponsored messaging ad formats. So that was message ads and conversation ads. The only way to bid for those was percent, which if you put this into the same parlance as the rest of the advertising that we do, you can only pay per single impression that you were sending. So if you had two different message ads going head to head, the only way for LinkedIn to know what a click or an engagement was, which one of these was performing better was with opens. But an open is not a very true form of engagement here. It doesn't tell you which ad was performing better. That comes to the click the actual click. But clicks on sponsored messaging, oftentimes will happen three, six days later, after the ad has already been sent to them. And that's not enough notice for the auction to take it into account. So we would notice that when we ran sponsored messaging campaigns with optimized for performance, one of the ads would get shown a disproportionate amount of time, and the other just had next to no impressions. We used to do this manually where we would go switch all of our sponsored messaging campaigns over into rotate ads evenly. And this allowed us to do more of what we actually wanted to do, which is AB testing our two creatives. And this has been to three years now, but LinkedIn caught on and realized that this is the experience that advertisers should be having with sponsored messaging. So now when you open a sponsored messaging campaign, your ad rotation settings are going to be set to even. But all the other ad formats as far as I know, they're all by default set to optimize for performance, which is exactly the right way to go in my opinion. I think defaults should be set for the majority of advertisers. This is one case where LinkedIn got the defaults totally right. This is an advertisers best interests. We also had a situation recently where one of our clients, they're not going specifically for high click through rates, because this is very much a long play for them. They're just doing brand awareness at this point. And what we noticed with this client is pretty much every ad that we launch has about average click through rate, but we have a lot of different creatives that we want to test and we want to learn about. So what we ended up doing was turning on even ad rotation here. And it's actually turned out really well for us, but that is only because the ads had similar click through rates to begin with. If one of your ads has a lower click through rate, inevitably, you're going to start getting punished with lower impressions and higher cost per click. So far, those are the only two cases where we actually recommend even ad rotation. But if any of you have any other great use cases you found, I'd love to hear about it. Reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. Okay, so that leaves a giant hole for us on LinkedIn Ads, because we still want to do this AB testing. But if we tried to use the ad rotation setting that was built for AB testing, but it ends up being bad for us, then what's an advertiser to do? Well, LinkedIn heard us loud and clear. This is a tool that has been coming for a long time. And we actually posted about it a couple of weeks ago. If you go to the left hand navigation inside of campaign manager to test, you'll notice you can now create an AB test. And we've talked about this in a past episode. But we also did a whole post about it, you'll find this post down in the show notes if you want to check it out. And LinkedIn actually reached out to us about that post to let us know what was coming in the future. Because currently, we don't find this feature very helpful. The main reason why is when you create a new test, whether you set up a campaign versus campaign, or an audience versus audience, or an ad versus ad, it creates two brand new campaigns, each one with a single ad in. And I do not think that this is the best environment for an AB test to have. These are two campaigns competing against each other from the very beginning with no history. So honestly, we haven't even used this feature, I just don't even find it useful. But LinkedIn did reach out to us on it and let us know. And I'm going to share a quote here. They said, "The good news is that customers can use the winning AB test campaign as an evergreen campaign following the conclusion of the test. Additionally, allowing for existing campaigns in new AB tests is in our roadmap. So more to come." So backing up a little bit, one of the biggest reasons why we don't like having new campaigns created every time we launch a new test is those campaigns are now just littering the account. We're going to now have several if not 10s, 20s, 50s, of campaigns that are absolute garbage, that we then just have to mark as archived and try to ignore them inside the platform. The AB testing feature that would be useful to me is AB testing ad creatives in a single campaign. And then that way, it's not littering up the account. And as we move forward, the winner gets to stay in the campaign and the loser, we can just turn off. And it sounds like from this response. That's going to be the functionality in the future. But right now, we're stuck with having to create new campaigns. If this topic is really interesting to you, you may want to go back and listen to episode 36. That was all about AB testing on the ads platform. And we do cover it pretty intensely there. But I do want to share with you now the basics of how I approach AB tests on the platform. First, I'm always going to start by leaving ad rotation on optimized for performance. Like I mentioned, except for when we're using sponsored messaging ad formats, I'm also going to run multiple campaigns targeting the same audience at the same time. An example of how I might do that might be one campaign is targeting the same ICP by their job title, but another one might be targeting them by job function with seniority. So same ICP, but different campaigns and ways of reaching them, then I'm going to launch the same AB test in both of those campaigns. And it's a little bit more complex than I'm making it sound because we're probably going to have more than two campaigns targeting the same ICP. And the more you have, the better this data is going to be. But let's say in one campaign, ad A wins and gets better reach at lower cost. But in the next campaign, LinkedIn actually decided that ad B one and ad B got more impressions at a lower cost. You might be wondering, okay, which of these ads is actually the winner. So that's why you might want 3, 4, 5 campaigns targeting your ICP, which is one of the reasons why you would hire us to do this, rather than trying to do it yourself. But I realized that's not in the cards for everyone. Hence why I'm sharing with you our approach here. But when you run this test over time, you'll notice that the platform in general will start to prefer one of your ads, either ad A or ad B. And now you know, regardless of whether LinkedIn made the right call in each of those campaigns, as to which ad won or not, you get the overall data telling you that yes, ad A is the winner here. And you should go all in on an A. Or, you do have the data telling you that hey, in one of these targeting types, or to one of these sonorities ad B is actually a better ad creative. And so you can leave ad B running in those and leave ad A running in the ones where it won. You've got lots of options here. But the principle stands. If you run an AB test in just one campaign, LinkedIn may choose the wrong ad to give the better relevancy score to and over time, it'll shake out it'll get better, but I usually want better ad data right from the very beginning. All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around. 16:20 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. Like we mentioned in this episode, the post that's describing how the AB testing tool inside of campaign manager works, you can go and read that post. It's a great one. There's also episode 36. That's all about AB testing. So we've linked to that as well. Now, if you or anyone you know, is looking to learn more about LinkedIn Ads and managing them, check out the course that I did on LinkedIn Learning all about LinkedIn Ads. It is by far the highest quality and the lowest cost course out there. If this is your first time listening, welcome, we're excited to have you here. And I invite you to subscribe. If this is not your first time listening, please go and rate and review the podcast on whatever player you use. Most are doing this on Apple podcasts. I've heard several mention that they've done it on Spotify. I just don't get to see the reviews on Spotify. But I'm imagining at some point they're going to roll it out and I'll be able to see them and I can start shouting you out for them. With any questions, suggestions, or corrections, please do reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. I'm cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Click to Message Ads early sneak peek Vidmob Study by Cooper Nefsky Follow AJ on LinkedIn NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Youtube Channel Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript Are you prepared for the LinkedIn Adspocalypse come down into my prepper shelter. And let's talk about the end times. I promise I have enough mashed potatoes and root beer to get us through the turbulence 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, my apologies for skipping a week of recording recently. I went on a much needed vacation with my wife over spring break. We ended up going on a cruise down to Honduras and Mexico. And it was absolutely amazing. But now I need to work on losing those four pounds that suddenly appeared out of nowhere. Pesky pounds. Like I shared in the teaser, we're talking today about changes to the platform that may come. And I'm super geeking out in this episode, so I'll leave it at that for now. Let's jump into the news for this week. First off Vidmob, who has an official LinkedIn partner, they released a study recently all about how people are interacting with video ads. And it's a really solid study, lots of good data. I couldn't even begin to plan a test like what they've done. They analyzed all different types of things that video ads might include. They might be length, or color contrast, or whether a logo was present, or who the subject of the video was all of this stuff that is very subjective with video, but they have incredible data for it. I've linked you to an article on LinkedIn by Cooper Nefsky, who's head of partnerships at Vidmob. And he wrote it up really well. Here were some of the quick points that I pulled out. For all objectives. videos that are shorter than 30 seconds tended to have the best engagement. So that's a great reminder, we should keep video ads short. Make sure your logo is burned into the video. There is quite a bit of advice out there saying like don't dwell on your logo and don't try to make it a big branding piece. But honestly, I totally agree with what they said, because they noticed an average 17% lift in click through rate when the brand logo was present during the first few seconds opening. Another great tip here was to make sure you include a human storyline when possible. They said especially in the consideration phases of advertising in those objectives, that human storylines tended to play much better. This one's not a big surprise. But I'm really glad to see the data around it. Brighter colors and high contrast works really well in the awareness objectives. And this makes perfect sense, because it makes it a thumb stopper. This is what we've always recommended with static ads in having bright and high contrast and colors to what else is on LinkedIn. So this was really cool to see. I was also really impressed, they had three different reports. One that was industry agnostic, they had one specifically for financial services, and another one where all of their examples are tech. So I highly recommend go check out those reports. I was really impressed. I also got an email recently. And the subject line was credit available for paused LinkedIn ads that were launched in error. As I read into it, LinkedIn realized that there was a glitch that happened back in December of 2022, where some paused creatives went through a review and actually went live despite being paused. So this may or may not apply to you, it actually only applied to like four of the accounts that we manage. And I don't know how big that credit is that we're going to get. But I do just want to take this chance to commend LinkedIn for going back after the fact and letting us know when they've caught an error and refunding us. This is something I haven't seen on any other platform, at least doing it this actively. And I have high praise for LinkedIn to reach out with these types of things. I had two reviews I want to highlight this week, a user by the name of India9076 Sorry, if your name is India, I don't know how to figure out who you are. So I can't thank you by name. But they said, "Great podcast. I've learned a lot from listening to this podcast, great for those who are looking to scale up their LinkedIn activity." India, thanks so much for leaving that. We also have a review left by BillyGubby. He's the Pps Director at pink sheep out of the UK. He left a review that says, "Great as always consistently great, useful info from AJ." Billy, I really appreciate you saying that we work hard on consistency. So with that being said, I want to feature you. So if you're listening and you have not left us a review yet, please do go leave us a review. And I want to give you a shout out live here. Okay, on to the topic at hand. Let's hit it. Back during episode 92, in the news section, we talked about a glitch that had happened. Many advertisers noticed that several features had disappeared. And it only took a few hours for LinkedIn to realize and start responding to the community letting them know that this was just a glitch and everything actually did return to normal within a few hours. But it did get us thinking what is the future of LinkedIn Ads? How wouldn't be respond, what would we do if any of the features that we know and love and use were taken away from us? Of course, we know that change is absolutely inevitable on every ads platform, and LinkedIn is no exception. Just ask SEOs who lost referring keywords from Google Analytics back years ago. Or ask the Google Ads folks who all of a sudden had no control over Google starting to show their ads for close keyword variants that they weren't even targeting, regardless of match type. Maybe ask those Facebook ads, folks who are upset that every 10 minutes, the platform's UI totally changes, it makes it more complex to navigate and find where things are. Or when Facebook shuts down accounts left and right, and you have no recourse or human review process when your business is hurting. I've probably beaten this dead horse way too much here. But there's so many examples of this happening with digital marketing platforms. So if things do go away, how can you be prepared for it? I think when you actually understand and know a platform, inside and out, everything becomes a lever. I talk a lot in broad terms on this show. I'll talk about how certain ad formats don't work, or certain bid strategies aren't effective? Well, the truth is, there's probably some case maybe except for audience expansion, where every option could be used to your advantage. So what I want you to get out of this is not only concrete things that you could do to prepare for platform changes. But I also want you to think deeply and critically about how the platform works, I want you to understand it and learn it inside and out. So that you can roll with the punches when and if something changes. Also is one word of warning, don't be too reliant on any one thing in the ad platform. That means don't be married to one ad format, or an objective, or a certain targeting type. We actually had a client, they started out by using several different ad formats, and they found sponsored messaging to work really, really well. And they're based in Europe. Well, then, as many of you know, in Europe, GDPR killed the sponsored messaging ad formats. And once message ads went away, we ended up losing the client, because they were too reliant on that one thing. And we definitely learned from that experience, we should have helped them to make sure that they were running a wider variety of ad formats and hedging their bets there. But we're always sad to lose a client. So we want to help you understand the ads platform at that deep level. I want to help you think critically about how LinkedIn Ads works, and what you can do to work around these things. When this glitch happened, it also made us wonder, could this have been actually an accidental early rollout instead of just a simple glitch. So if these things actually do roll out in the future, and we lose features, let's talk about what you would actually do if some of these things were removed. Alright, here's a quick sponsor break. And then we'll dive into what to do if any of these glitches actually do get rolled out. 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. Want some of that back in terms of a 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 or official LinkedIn partners. To book a call, just go to B2Linked.com/apply and we'd absolutely love the chance to get to work together. Alright, let's jump into how you can react if any of these glitches do become permanent. So first off, one of the things we noticed is that text ads as an ad format were removed. For each of these features being removed, I'm gonna go through the same framework listing, why would this be bad if it happened? Why it could possibly be good. The things you could do instead. And then finally, the likelihood of this actually being rolled out permanently. Alright, first off with text ads being removed. Why would this be bad? Well, I think removing text ads would be terrible. We love them as branding reinforcement on our other ad formats. They get so many free and cheap impressions. And they're especially good for those on very small budgets. But let's flip the tables here. Why could this actually be good for LinkedIn or even for us? I could definitely see LinkedIn doing this because text ads take up valuable real estate on desktop for users. And because they're very inexpensive clicks, LinkedIn probably doesn't make very much money on them. We've also noticed that outside of North America, text ads rarely actually make sense because LinkedIn still enforces the same him to dollar floor bid on them as when they launched back in 2008. So in other areas of the world, people are getting clicks for less than $1 from sponsored content. So text ad clicks are actually more expensive. Alright, so let's say that we actually do lose text ads in the future. What could you do instead? Well, dynamic ads are about three times the cost, but they do take up three times the real estate, and get three times the click through rate. So you might be able to argue that it could be worthwhile to use it. And they are often a couple bucks less expensive per click than sponsored content clicks. So a spotlight ad might be worth testing into. Alright, so how likely is this actually going to happen, I would actually give this about a 60% chance of happening eventually. And one clue I've got, we actually did see something with text ads change here a couple years ago. LinkedIn used to promote the top text ad in the three pack to the very top of the page as a text link. And LinkedIn internally used to call this ad slot, the one by one, it was visually out of place, and it made no sense. And then they killed it. I didn't especially have much of an opinion on removing that. But one of our clients got so much performance from that inventory, that once it was taken away, they were forced to abandon it. And it really shook up their results and their whole approach to the platform. Okay, the next thing that advertisers were reporting back during that glitch, they noticed that inside of the website visits objective, you could no longer bid by max delivery. Alright, so why would this be bad? Well, anytime someone takes bidding options away from us, it's always bad. Bidding options are one of the best controls and levers that we have to optimize costs on the platform. But let's think about this. Why could it be good if this happened? Well, I can kind of see LinkedIn logic here. If you're trying to get people to click on your ads to go to your site, maybe in LinkedIn's mind paying by the click makes more sense than paying by the impression. It's a bit of a stretch, but maybe I could make a case for it if I were there internally. Alright, so say this happens, what could you do instead? Well, since paying by the click is the cheapest way to pay on LinkedIn 90% of the time, I may not miss this particular feature. But we know that paying by the impression is actually more economical when you have really high click through rates. So if I were running ads that did get really high click through rates, I would probably try launching the same ads to the same targeting but in a different objective that would allow me to use maximum delivery. I'd probably start with engagement, I might consider the conversion objective as well. Alright, so likelihood of actually happening, I would give this one probably a 1% chance of happening. I really think that this is sincerely a glitch, it wouldn't make that much sense to me. But here's the next glitch, we noticed that spotlight ads were gone. We could no longer create a spotlight ad. So why would this be bad? Well, this is bad for anyone who is having success with spotlight ads. Losing any ad format is rough for those who are currently having success with it. But I'm sure there are some people who really rely on and really like spotlight ads. Alright, so why might this be good for us? Well, dynamic ads in general really aren't my favorite ad format. The only bright spot for me is follower ads. It's by far the best ad format for getting more followers to accompany page. So LinkedIn, removing spotlight ads wouldn't be the worst thing in the world for me. But if you take away follower ads, then I started to have a little bit bigger of an issue with it. Alright, so if spotlight ads go away and you wanted to use them, what could you do instead? Well, I think single image sponsored content ads are great. And in my experience, they tend to be about $2 to $3 per click more expensive than spotlight ads. But now since we don't have a bid floor, you could try running a similar ad to what you were running in your spotlight ad and just run it as single image sponsored content. And now just bid manually lower, so that you're paying in the range of what you're paying for spotlight ads. What about likelihood of actually happening here? This one could actually happen if LinkedIn decided, say, for instance, not enough people were using it to justify the maintenance. Since I don't know how many people are actually using these, I'd probably give it maybe a 20% chance of actually happening. Then we noticed the glitch that message ads were gone. The reason why this glitch caught my attention is because LinkedIn had already let us know that they were going to be sunsetting or getting rid of message ads. So when this ad format disappeared, I started to get concerned because if a bunch of weird things happen, I can just assume that it's a weird glitch. But because a bunch of weird things happen and the ad format that we were expecting to go away actually went away. That made me question if it's possible that this was actually an accidental early rollout, rather than just a simple glitch. So we know that message ads are actually going away. And by the time you listen into it, they may actually be gone. So this might be a little bit of a moot point to cover this. But why would it be bad to lose this ad format? Well, again, losing any ad format is sad for those who found success with it. It's such a unique ad format and you can't do this kind of functionality on any other platform, being able to pay to message someone. But why could this be good that it's going away? Well, it's an ad format that's always been LinkedIn's most expensive traffic. And I haven't found many scenarios where they work very well. Outside of very VIP offers and warm audiences. The price has always been a huge turnoff for me. So honestly, good riddance. But for this one, what will we be able to use instead? Thankfully, we're about to get much better options to replace message ads. We actually published an article last week on click to message ads that are going to be rolled out soon. More on that in a future episode, but check out the article about it in the show notes below if you want to get some early insight. So now the likelihood of this actually happening? Yeah, this is 100%. We're definitely gonna lose message ads. So I do have some advice for you some best practices to help you stay ahead of the game, just in case platform changes could derail your performance. Three pieces of advice here, number one, don't be a one trick pony. Test different objectives, different ad formats, different messaging, different bidding methods, be willing to test everything. And then that way, you'll have some backup things in place, just in case something fails or disappears or changes. Advice point number two, don't get comfortable on the platform. Realize that there's going to be changes and they will be disruptive at some point. So just start to expect the unexpected. Advice point number three, make hay while the sun shines. And that means if you have something that's working well, keep using it, enjoy it, appreciate it. I had a glitch early on where I could target audiences down to an audience size of one. And that was back when the platform only allowed targeting of 1000 plus. I knew it was a glitch. I knew it would be caught and patched at some point. So I prioritized tests and I had fun with it. And boy, you really missed the things that you had once they're gone. 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. Alright, we talked about the click to message ads early sneak peek. So check that out in the show notes. You'll see there's a link to the article that we wrote there. There's also a link to the Vidmob study that was done by Cooper Nefsky. Great article, great study, definitely check that out. If you or anyone you know, is looking to learn more about LinkedIn Ads, I highly recommend the LinkedIn Learning course that I did with LinkedIn on LinkedIn Ads. That's a mouthful. But it is by far the highest quality course at the lowest cost for LinkedIn Ads, check it out. And there is a nice quick link there in the show notes below on that one. If this is your first episode, you've listened to welcome, thanks for coming, and make sure to hit that subscribe button. But if this isn't your first time listening, if you've gotten any value out of the podcast, please do let us know in the form of a rating and review. We've had lots of people leaving on Apple podcasts, but also Spotify. It really is the best way that you can say thank you for us putting this content out. All right with any questions, suggestions, or corrections, reach out to us at podcast at B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Illiana Acosta on LinkedIn Partner Hub Follow AJ on LinkedIn NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Youtube Channel Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript AJ Wilcox LinkedIn 's official marketing partner program. Who are these partners? And how do you become one? What are the requirements? We cover the LinkedIn partner program on this week's episode of the LinkedIn ads show. Illiana Acosta Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. AJ Wilcox Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics, you've heard us talk about how we're an official LinkedIn partner. And you've probably used the tools of other partners to manage or report on your LinkedIn Ads initiatives. I met Illiana Acosta , who's one of the senior managers of the LinkedIn partner team at the B2Believe event that was in November. We talked all about that event on episode 79. And I thought it would be really interesting to bring her on and talk to her all about the program. Many of you have asked me what it takes to become a partner. So this episode is for you. First in the news, Jae Oh, who's head of ads measurement and audiences at LinkedIn. He wrote an article this month, called What's New With the Company Engagement report on LinkedIn. For those of you who don't know, there's this report that if you go and click on any of your audiences that our company list uploads, or sometimes we call them our ABM lists, if you click on that Companies list, it now takes you to this report called the company engagement report. And this is so cool. If you're advertising to a list of companies, now you can get all of this analytics and demographics information about who is actually engaging with your ads. It's way cool. Well, Jae talked about all the new updates that have happened to it. And I wanted to point out the things that I thought were really cool. First off, there's this company segmentation feature. So now you can dynamically prioritize the accounts that you're going after in certain campaigns, you can actually create a static list of here are the companies I want to go into which segment. But what's so exciting to me is the dynamic segmentation, where now you can say every day, I want LinkedIn to go to my list and go just for the companies that have the highest engagement. And let's show ads specifically to them. And you can have another segment, that's all about low engagement. So now with your campaigns, you can show different messages to companies that maybe aren't as engaged so we can try something new. The static segment is actually just a snapshot of the lowest engaged companies. And it's not going to change. We've linked to that article down in the show notes. So go give it a read and check it out. If that's interesting to you. I wanted to highlight a review left by Craig Sea. And that's the last name is S E. A. Craig says, "Very insightful and educational. I'm so happy I came across this podcast, I've learned a lot from it. Myself, being a beginner, started listening to this podcast. I've also started AJ's course, which is giving me a lot of confidence to get started running my own ads. Great podcast five stars from me." Craig, thanks so much for heeding the call and leaving that review. I'm so glad that couple of our resources could give you the confidence to begin advertising. You get five stars for me as well. Thanks, Craig. As a reminder, I want to feature you as well. If you haven't already left us a review, please do. And I'd love to give you a shout out. All right. Without further ado, we'll go ahead and jump right into the interview. Let's hit it. Illiana, I'm so excited to have you here. For those who don't know, Illiana is a senior manager on the LinkedIn ads business. She supports the LinkedIn Marketing Partners. She's also the Global Co Chair of the Latino ERG at LinkedIn. Illiana, thanks so much for being here. Illiana Acosta Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate the enthusiasm and welcoming me on your show. AJ Wilcox You and I actually just met at the B2Believe event not too long ago back in November. Yes. It was awesome to get to hang out with you get to know you a little bit. I was excited to have you on the show because obviously you know so much about this. So give us an introduction to yourself. Tell us about yourself anything that I may not have covered in the intro. Yeah. Well, I was Illiana Acosta Well, I was born on a Monday. Oh, wait, no, I won't go back that far. I have been with LinkedIn for about four and a half years and I have been supporting our channel sales business which is our LinkedIn marketing partners program since day one. So I've seen it since its let's call it infancy stages to now its teenage years where we are operating almost like a mid level startup, if you will, right. It's like this crazy, awesome, high growth team and business that's supporting so much of what we're doing in our ads business to grow our business, but more so ensure that we are driving value for our customers with our marketing partners. In addition to my day job in managing our enterprise partners ad tech team. I am also the global co chair, as you mentioned, our Hispanics of LinkedIn's Alliance ERG, which is really helping to pour into our Latino community within our LinkedIn doors, but also within the community at large. So I've been in that role for a couple of years now, I'm actually stepping away from the co chair role in a couple months and giving an opportunity to newcomers, which is a little bittersweet, but we've done incredible work. And I will continue investing in diversity, equity and inclusion in some way, shape or form within the organization. So really excited to be here. So thank you for having me. AJ Wilcox Very cool. I announced that you are part of the Latino ERG, we may have listeners who aren't part of large organizations who may not know about employee resource groups, can you share just a little bit about what these groups are? Why They Matter? Illiana Acosta Absolutely. Let's take a step back as an employee, right? Every single person experiences their tenure, if you will, with an organization in different ways, some more than others, some negatively, some positively. And so when we look at our workplace, we tend to say like, I want to go somewhere where I feel like I belong, or I want to make sure that people understand me, or that I'm seen and heard and valued in a way that I haven't before. And for that I need to find community. And so at LinkedIn, we have about 10 ERG is employee resource groups that go everywhere from Black, Latino, LGBTQ, plus the Asian community, veterans, etc, etc. There's so many incredible groups and communities that people can be a part of, as soon as they join the organization feel a complete sense of belonging as soon as they join day one, but also find people that they can relate to and build community with. And it's also an incredible opportunity for allies, to learn more about different communities and how they can be of support. Because at the end of the day, we spent so much of our time at work and working with individuals and colleagues. And all we want to make sure is that we're doing really great work for people who appreciate us who see us and understand that our differences are what makes us so unique and great together. AJ Wilcox I love that. All right. So switching gears here to your role there at LinkedIn, I would love to hear how you specifically are supporting advertisers, maybe those of us who are listening who may not already be LinkedIn partners. Illiana Acosta Yeah, absolutely. So our LinkedIn marketing partners, is a global community of qualified technology and service providers that help our customers, our marketers achieve more on LinkedIn, in simple terms, like on our own work about us, you know, we're great, but we're so much greater with our partners. With partners, everything is better, right? So if I can give an example. So today, customers are facing changing buyer behavior, right, for example, shifting to e-commerce, etc. There's growth in the tech landscape. We're seeing an increase in spending martech from advertisers. There is now more new and emerging channels, right? Like think about it, the average number of channels to make purchase decisions increased by 2x in the last five years. And so it makes marketers jobs that much more challenging to actually go get to their goals and objectives, right. And so our marketing partners, our LinkedIn marketing partners can help navigate and reduce some of these complexities. And so what my role is, it's really working with a team of great amazing high performers. And I lead a team that's working with our enterprise level partners. And those enterprise level partners are typically those partners that are working with our enterprise or global strategic accounts. So those bigger, bigger customers at LinkedIn. However, we have three different teams that support our channel business today. So we have our enterprise partners, which I just explained, are those bigger partners that are working with our biggest accounts, so enterprise and strategic accounts, then we have our skilled partners team that's led by my colleague, John Hall, who's total awesomeness in the West Coast. And he's working with these partners that are typically supporting our online sales or customers or small to mid level size customers. And then we also have our content partners, who are creating these custom content solutions and creative solutions that help enhance a customer's LinkedIn campaign on the platform. And that's led by my colleague, Ally Rash, who's based out in New York. And so we have a whole ecosystem of partners that can help customers address some of the marketing challenges that they have, not only for LinkedIn, but as a whole for their, you know, social media buying as a whole. And so these partners, regardless of their enterprise, or scale, what we classify them internally, they help customers save time, right? So that they have to go through a less of a manual process to set up or manage your campaigns. Like, seriously, can I get an amen for saving time? Amen. Right. I'm like, I love saving time, anything to make me operate more efficient, Sign me up. And so these partners allow marketers to do that. They also allow them to plan more accurately, or target for every stage of the funnel. And so now you can actually sync your marketing strategy, your campaigns optimizations across multiple channels, all within our partner platforms. And so when you're thinking about activating your ad campaign gains, you want to get the most out of every single dollar you're investing. And so they also allow for a more in depth understanding of the performance of your campaigns. So you can make better decisions, you can shift dollars, you can shift creatives, you can do things, and optimize on the fly and get so much more value out of your campaigns with LinkedIn, and across our marketing partners. AJ Wilcox So we obviously don't want to call out any specific partners. We don't want to give anyone a preferred treatment here. Can you tell us about what are some of the kinds of things that you can do through partners, I'm imagining some will help you create campaigns, some will help you optimize and manage some will help you report. What sort of categories am I missing? Illiana Acosta Yeah, there's a few categories. So one, there's a ton of value in using the partners just because, you know, they allow you to do so much more with us. Over 70% of customers today, with LinkedIn are already using one or more partners. And so everybody's coming to the party. And so they are tapping into a partner for planning. Right. So insights, helping you developing the right content and creating your campaigns, targeting the right audiences at scale. So planning, we have partners that support campaign execution and tracking. So whether that's page management or campaign management with LinkedIn, we also have partners that are supportive reporting and ROI. And lead gen, everybody loves a good lead gen campaign. And so there's so many ways that a partner is supporting customers needs. It just really depends on what are your goals and objectives, right, and let's start there. And then let's make sure that as a company, LinkedIn, we're doing everything possible to tap into our arsenal to address those challenges that you're having, but also allowing you to get to your goals and objectives. And sometimes that means, like, rockin out just with LinkedIn, right? But sometimes that also means tapping into a partner that can help you really elevate your campaigns and take your campaign further. AJ Wilcox I totally agree with that. Alright, so if I could, I would love to pull all of our listeners and ask them who is using a LinkedIn partner for their campaign management or for any part of it? But obviously, since we can't do that, I hear you correctly, you said 70% of LinkedIn advertisers are using a partner in one way or another? Illiana Acosta Yeah, over 70%. They're using one or more partners. In many cases, customers are using multiple partners for different use cases, right. And so one might be using a partner for reporting. Another one might be doing for lead gen, there's different use cases, everybody has their special sauce, you know, and so a marketer has the option to work with many partners in order to meet their campaign objectives and more so their marketing goals for the year for the quarter, whatever the case may be. And so yes, so a really good chunk of our customers are already using a partner for their LinkedIn campaigns today. AJ Wilcox Oh, yeah. All right. So this leads me to a really good question. How have you seen partners in one way or another elevate your customers LinkedIn campaigns? Illiana Acosta We're on a time constraint, so I can't even tell you all the stories. You know, again, I've been here four and a half years. So I've seen you know, across the gamut, small partners, large partners deliver so much value for our customers. And so if I think back to some recent real great wins, so we have metadata metadata, and I know we're not supposed to calling out but these are success stories, and you can find them on our hub. I'll give you the site later, but one of our partners metadata helped oyster with their full ABM strategy. And you know, we talked ABM at b2b believe in November, and so therefore, ABM strategy and execution of ad campaigns, I believe it resulted in 3x engagement rate on the campaign, and it's doubled their ROI in less than 12 months. And so I'm like, what is it that we did that right? It's like, okay, medicine is one of our enterprise level partners that one of my colleagues, managers, and then we have Zapier, who works with so many of our customers. It's like Zapier makes you happier, it's an inside joke on our team. But Zapier is real time. I know, it's so corny, but it's fun. They have a real time lead gen solution, and it worked with a customer harnessed.io to look at lead automation, and they were able to improve the accuracy by 99%. From campaign manager to market like huge Wow. And so it's kind of insane. And there's there's other stories of like, you know, teams have reduced their time by six hours per week. And while that might seem a lot take six times 52 weeks, like that's a lot of hours that you're saving a customer in managing their campaigns. Helping them operate more efficiently, helping them to do more with less especially now with this economic climate that, you know, we do have less resources, we may have less people. So how do you operate more efficiently when you're a brand that's activating 10, 20, 30, 100 campaigns in any given quarter? I would like to think that we're all super people, super women and men and people, but there's only so much we can do. So sometimes getting automated tools and tapping into the right tools more than anything, I think can make the biggest difference when you are executing your marketing campaigns with us. AJ Wilcox I totally agree with this. We've had several episodes in the past that are a partner product spotlight. So if anyone's ever curious, they can go back and listen to some of those spotlights we put on partners and different tools. But to your point about saving six hours a week, I just think of this as a marketer. Yeah, it's not a big deal to save six hours. But think about it. This is six, super mundane and monotonous hours that don't need to be spent, you can now go and spend that doing the really high value stuff, digging deep into the account finding opportunities for scale or decrease costs. So this really is a big deal. Yeah, we shouldn't be doing the mundane. Exactly. And Illiana Acosta Partners make it more accessible. They have scalable tools, it makes your day to day job a lot more simpler and more efficient. And you can spend more time doing the things that really, really require the most attention being more strategic. But you know, when it comes to like copy and pasting things, right, like that, sometimes it's a really long time, if you're managing multiple, multiple campaigns. So how can we collectively LinkedIn and our partners help to increase customer value, like, that's really why I'm even on this team and in this business. I want to help drive value, and I want to help make a difference, and how people are operating every single day. On our own, again, I mentioned, we're great, you know, we have amazing tools. But sometimes our customers need more access to different tools that our partners provide. And with our partners, they can do things simpler and more efficient, like day parting and auto optimization rules, and add flighting, and management, and creative optimizations and all the things that customers need to enhance their marketing campaigns with us. AJ Wilcox Yes, and I can't tell you how excited I am that there is now this partner ecosystem, because I kind of, quote unquote, grew up in the world of PPC. And there are so many partners out there, if you're running Google Ads, or Facebook Ads, there's so many different tools that you can take advantage of. LinkedIn hasn't had that it hasn't really been considered a tier one platform until what I would say is fairly recent. And now we have all of those types of things that you'd want to execute that you just mentioned, any of those needs you have, you can go out and find a partner who is doing this on LinkedIn. And I just want to say I think this is super powerful. I'm so proud of where it's landed. Illiana Acosta Yeah, you know, it's so funny, because like, before I started working here, I was like, B2B. B2B doesn't have to be boring, B2B can be fun, and really insightful, and really an incredible way to drive some meaningful business outcomes. And so we really have transformed over the last several years, I'd like to think it's when I joined the company, but I know that's not accurate. But it really has transformed into this platform that I am so proud to be a part of the growth of our LinkedIn ads business, the growth of the overall organization, what we stand for, and how we're so we are really doing everything we can to make sure that our customers, our marketers are getting everything that they need from us to be successful. And that is something that I am incredibly proud of. AJ Wilcox Oh, I love it. I know there's a lot to the partner programs, there's different tiers. Could you tell us a little bit about what maybe benefits are there for partners? Illiana Acosta Yeah, so we have different tiers of partners, depending on the tenure with us, but more so depending on the bandwidth and the use cases that you all support, right? Data linked, is a partner of ours, too. Yes, we know you're an OG, so this is good. Some other benefits include having a one to one relationship with a partner manager, depending on your level of tier. And that is incredible, because you have a trusted resource that you can literally work with every single week to help identify meaningful go to market strategies that are going to help to elevate and drive awareness around our value together as partners, and what we do for our customers together. And so that is powerful, because we have, you know, over 1000 partners in our ecosystem, but not every single partner is managed, and that every single partner is certified they're all on a journey. And so that's the journey that's the path to get partner certified and into the the level of tear that they're hoping to as they grow with us and they get manager or partner manager on my team or John's team or Bruno's team or Lara's team that I work with but, more so you know there's opportunity to tap into additional resources that we have to drive go to market together. There's opportunity to sync directly with our sales teams. There's opportunity to work directly with our sales leaders to identify leads, prospects, and more. So identify where can we drive the most value for our customers together, there's opportunity to be a part of our events that we have throughout the year B2Believe, Partner Connect, I heart ABM, there's so many different touch points that we can include here within, and vice versa, right. There's also an opportunity for us to show up for your events and be a part of any thought leadership, any webinars, any in person sessions. There's opportunity to tell stories together, I love telling stories together. Because together, we can really help make a big difference. And so how do we tag team on all efforts to really help again, elevate not so much our companies but elevate the value that we're offering customers, right, because if together, we continue to build solutions that will help address market challenges and marketers find value in it working with us, it's just going to be a byproduct of that, right? Like they want to work people that can help solve things for them. And we want to do that with our partners. And so So that's some of the benefits that you can expect to receive from our partner program. Working with our cross functional teams, we have dedicated resources on the business development side, on the partner end side, we have our B2B Institute, which is our think tank and is fully equipped with incredible thought leaders. We have a full partner marketing team that is ready and able to start on some really cool marketing concepts that again, can help elevate the value that we're driving for our customers. And so as we evolve this program and continue to grow, there's so much information that we disseminate through webinars and different methods. And so you can find a lot of that on the hub, which is our LinkedIn marketing partner hub. If you search on Bing, you can directly find that link. And I can also share the links with you, AJ, so you can share out to your followers, your subscribers on here. But yeah, so I think that there's opportunity for are always on marketing programs, which obviously you get visibility on our hub, which is external facing for all customers and marketers to visit. So that will give you free marketing and visibility for customers to come and learn more about you. That hub also houses our success stories with customers and partners. So that's another touch point that we can really have there. And then again, as I mentioned before, I think for us, it's really, really valuable. And we've had a lot of feedback from partners, that having that FaceTime with our sales team, either one on one or one to many, whether it be in a larger format or smaller, has been incredibly valuable globally. And so our marketing partners program is not just in North America, but it's literally across the globe. And many of our partners support our customers across the globe. And some are starting to really branch out into different regions as well, helping to have that global footprint, which is great. AJ Wilcox I love this. All right, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll jump back into the interview. Illiana Acosta 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. Do you want some of that investment back? 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, allowing 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 an official LinkedIn partner, which after this episode, you'll know exactly what that means. Just mosey on over to B2Linked.com/apply. We'd absolutely love the chance to get to work with you. Alright, let's go ahead and jump back into the interview. So I have to ask what qualifies someone to be a marketing partner? I'm imagining because this is with the API. This means these are people who are building tools, right? Who else is able to become a part? Illiana Acosta It really just depends on the use cases that you support, right? What's your special sauce? And whether or not our API's currently support the use case that you're looking to really invest in with us. And so you know whether you as a platform can support a campaign management, reporting an ROI. We talked about this before, but audiences, page management insights, lead gen content and creative. So if you fall under any of those use cases that we are API support today, these are all specialties that our current partners do support. If you fall under any of those, you may have a good chance of becoming one of our LinkedIn marketing partners. So there is a developer website that you can visit to apply to become a partner and we will evaluate the use case that you currently support how you're looking to really plug into our LinkedIn API's. And if there's a match, and you fall under any of those specialties, then we can start working together. AJ Wilcox Oh, if there is someone out there who's creating a tool or wants to create a tool, what advice would you give them? What can they do to better help their case to have a higher likelihood of being prioritized or or being taken on as a partner? Illiana Acosta I think one be specific in your application, right? As you can imagine, we get a ton of requests, be specific on what's your special sauce, we want to hear about your special sauce to obviously, if you have customers that are asking for it, that's always a really great story to share with us. And so many of our customers are working with us, they want to activate their LinkedIn campaigns to our platform. And guess what, hey, we don't have integration with you. So can we work on that? And so that's a really great way, right? Because now we have customers asking for this integration to happen. And we can start having those conversations, we can start working with our business development team, with our partner interest team, with our product team and getting all our ducks in a row to make sure that happens. And total sidebar, I said, ducks in a row, and I'm looking out my window. And there's four ducks walking across the way by the lake. And it's so funny. AJ Wilcox That's amazing. Illiana Acosta Perfect line. Yeah. So I think if they do that, I think that will help build a case, right? Because whatever our customer needs from us, like, we want to make sure that we're accommodating that. And if one customer is asking for it, the likelihood of many other customers is very high, are also demanding that. Again, we want to work with customers in the way that they want to work with us. And if that's via a partner, let's make it happen. And let's make sure that we are helping to simplify the process and working with LinkedIn as much as possible, ease the transaction between customers, as partners, etc. To make sure that again, we help to simplify the process working with us while also delivering value, and really great outcomes for the marketer. AJ Wilcox Awesome Illiana. This has been fantastic. I appreciate you sharing all this information about the partner program. My last question for you is do you have anything exciting that you're working on professionally, and personally? Illiana Acosta Yeah, I'm actually working on a few projects right now. One, I just finished his voiceover workshop not long ago. And I really took the course just to try to do more public speaking because I really enjoy it, it really fills my cup. And then I started realizing, wow, this is a really cool like opportunity to tap into. And it's been really, really fun just trying to find ways to adjust my voice and work on different projects. So voiceover has been really fun. Also, I have a newsletter called Lost in Translation and sort of tapping into the diversity piece. But the newsletter focuses on highlighting challenges and limitations for historically excluded groups. And it's a focus on experiences that have shaped who they, I am, and how they and we and me I show up both in my professional life and my personal life, because based on our experiences that really shaped who we are and the way we show up at work. What else am I working on? I'm doing a bunch of speaking engagements around the power of authenticity and taming your inner critic, because you know, impostor syndrome is real. AJ Wilcox We've all got it. Illiana Acosta Oh, my gosh, even on my best days, I'm like, wait, I'm like, no, no, just go to sleep, go to sleep, girl go sleep. But you know, covering topics, you know, the power that we each have. We literally every single person listening on this and not listening, we have the power and influence to create more diverse, more inclusive, and more equitable spaces for every single member of the workforce. And we have more power than we think. And so as you look at your colleague next to you, whether it be in person or on the virtual screen, I talk about how can we show up for others in a meaningful way. And even the smallest action and thought could actually make the biggest difference. And so I've been doing a lot around speaking engagements around that, because I think that, you know, the only way that we're going to change what this world looks like, for future generations is if we start doing the work now. That's some of the stuff I'm working on. AJ Wilcox So true. Is there any way that you want people to be able to reach out to you after this interview? Do you want them to reach out to you on LinkedIn or anywhere else? Illiana Acosta Yeah, tap into LinkedIn, honestly, crazy enough, my main social platform and more tech platform that I leverage on a regular basis, not because I work here, but I really enjoy being on the platform. I feel like it feeds me in different ways mentally, spiritually, and educationally and professionally. So LinkedIn, connect with me, send me an InMail happy to dialogue, you know, have some dialogue on there. And yeah, happy to answer any questions as well. AJ Wilcox Perfect. So we'll put a link to your LinkedIn profile down in the show notes as well as the link to the marketing hub. Yes. Ileana, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing of your wisdom. Do you have any parting words for us? Illiana Acosta Yes. I have parting words for everyone listening, whether you are a customer, whether you are a prospective partner, whether you are an existing partner of ours, ask for what you need. If you don't ask, you don't get right. We want to support you. We want to help you, in working with us in a greater way. We want to have long term sustainable partnership with our partners. We want to have long term sustainable relationships with our customers. And we want to make sure that we're doing everything possible for you to work with us, and that we drive value in the way that you expect from us and so ask for what you need. Connect with me and let's start the conversation. AJ Wilcox Perfect. Illiana Acosta ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for being here. And please do everyone reach out to her shoot her an InMail make sure you're connected to her. She's a fantastic resource, especially for those who are partners or want to be partners. So thank you again for being here. Illiana Acosta Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. AJ Wilcox All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around Illiana Acosta Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. AJ Wilcox Okay, like we mentioned in the interview, we'll have a link to Illiana Acosta's profile on LinkedIn. So make sure you go and connect to her, send her a message, tell her she's awesome. She also mentioned the partner hub where you can go and find out all about LinkedIn marketing partners, the links there as well. You'll also see the link to the company engagement report that we talked about that was posted by Jae Oh, at LinkedIn. Now, if you're just getting started on LinkedIn Ads, or know someone who is I'd love it if you'd point them towards the LinkedIn Ads course on LinkedIn learning. I'm the instructor on that one. And I know I'm a little bit biased, but it is by far the highest quality and the lowest cost LinkedIn Ads course out there. If this is your first time listening, thank you and welcome. We'd love to have you subscribe, so you can hear more episodes like this in the future. If this is not your first time listening, I would love to invite you to rate and review the podcast on whatever player you're using. Or if you can't find a review function, go over to us Apple podcasts version. That's where the majority of the reviews come in. We don't charge anything for listening to this podcast, obviously. So the best way you can repay us and say thanks, is by leaving us a review. I'd really appreciate it with any questions, suggestions, or corrections for this episode or the podcast in general, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. With that being said, we'll see you back here next week. I'm cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: LinkedIn Certified Marketing Hub Follow AJ on LinkedIn NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Youtube Channel Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript Are you a LinkedIn certified marketing expert yet? It's time to get on that. This is your study guide to get certified 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! After announcing that I was one of the first six certified marketing experts with LinkedIn, lots of you reached out to ask how you could get the same certification. So this episode is a walkthrough of the certified LinkedIn Marketing Program. So you can get certified as well. We'll cover what it takes to achieve all the levels of certification, as well as how to stay certified once you get there. First in the news, we had a little scare happened last week, where some advertisers suddenly found that several features of the LinkedIn Ads platform we're missing. Hat tip to JD Garcia for pointing this out in a post he put out. We found that on some accounts, text ads were gone as an ad format, website visits campaigns could no longer bid by max delivery, message ads were gone, which is not totally unexpected from what we talked about in the news last week. So all of us advertisers were totally up in arms, trying to figure out what are we doing without these features. Luckily, LinkedIn confirmed later that day that it was just a bug, but we still got some fears around it. So we're planning an episode soon that will go into depth on all of these things, what it means the future, and what we can do to work around things like this, if they ever do change permanently. So stay tuned for that. I wanted to highlight a review here, the username, thecrusher1263 said, Great podcast. This is easily the best resource on LinkedIn ads that I've ever found." So the crusher, I don't know who you are. So I can't thank you by name. But I certainly appreciate the shout out there. Me and my team all work super hard to make sure that this stays the best resource on LinkedIn Ads out there. So thanks for that. And you listener, if you agree that this is the best resource out there on LinkedIn Ads, please follow the incredible example of thecrusher1263 and go and leave us a review. Honestly, it's the best way that you can say thanks for all the work that me and my team put together for the show. And of course, I will give you a shout out. So go leave a review, Apple podcast is usually the best place to do that. But anywhere you can leave a review, I would love it. Okay, without further ado, let's hit it. So we're talking about LinkedIn certified marketing program. And for those of you who want me just to read you the address, you can go to training.marketing.linkedin.com. And of course, that URL is in the show notes below so you can just get easy access. Just scroll down look at the show notes. This program has been a long time coming. For years and years, I've been talking to LinkedIn about having a certification program. Five years ago, I was even working with the team to create a certification exam. And then that project kind of got shelved and it got pushed off. But now that it's out, it actually turned out to be a much bigger deal than I originally thought. I remember the early days of Google Ads and Google Analytics certifications. I believe Google Ads was always free., but the certification exam has been kind of difficult. But I definitely remember Google Analytics.  remember paying $50, and you only get one chance. And if you don't pass, you have to go pay another 50 bucks. But it was a really complete training course. And the end exam was something I really had to study for. $50 is obviously not a ton to invest into your career, but it definitely shows if you're willing to pay 50 bucks, you're in and you're invested. And that was also a low enough amount that companies would sponsor their employees. We'd be willing to pay 50 bucks to get an employee certified. Then Facebook blueprint came along and to become Facebook certified, it was actually kind of expensive. I don't remember the cost, I want to say it was like $2,000 or something like that. But you had to really want it. So going into this LinkedIn have some great models to follow. And here's how the program ended up being structured. First of all, it's free, anyone can do this, which I really appreciate. It's also a very complex program with lots of requirements that goes way beyond just passing a test. And actually, there are multiple tests in a variety of different areas of marketing. When you go to get signed up for the first time, you'll sign in with your LinkedIn credentials. And the instructions are pretty clear how to work your way through the program. I'll also say that especially later on in the program, in levels two and three, it is very hands on. You're not just passing tests that you work on, you're actually working with LinkedIn staff all along the way. And there's a selection process to get you into the higher tiers. I'm going to walk you through the whole program and share insights that will help you get through it faster and more effectively. With one caveat, the program is always subject to change. It's always in flux. So your mileage may vary and the requirements may certainly change. So the very first level that you get to earn you get to earn it through taking certification exams. This is called level one certified marketer. Currently, there's a fundamentals course, and a marketing strategy course, and a content and creative design course. For each one, you can watch modules that are 40 to 60 minutes long. And they're essentially training courses on the ads platform, and other areas of marketing on LinkedIn. A lot of it is even just theory. Once you're done watching all of those videos, you can then take the certification exam. And actually, you are able to just take the certification exam without watching the videos, which is totally something that you can decide to do, I'm not going to tell you how to do it. What I will say though, is I did not get a 100% on any of them. And I know you might expect the host of the LinkedIn Ads Show podcast to get 100% on everything, it's important to understand that a lot of the questions are subjective, or maybe a little bit trickily worded. And there were even plenty of the answers that I didn't actually agree with. But all of them are taken directly from the content of the videos. So it's definitely worth your time. What I would do, if I were you, I would set aside an entire day, just to watch all of the videos and take the tests and the exam, just knock it all out in one day. But of course, you can string this out over time. But after you take these exams, you'll get a certificate, and you can then add that certificate to your LinkedIn profile, you can share it with your network, and just generally be proud of getting a level one certified marketer. Now, I originally took all these exams over two years ago. So by the time I got to the highest level, my certifications had actually expired. And so I needed to go back and retake the exam. It's not a big deal to retake. I think the tests are something like 60 questions. So it's not huge, but you do have to plan on re-upping those every so often. But that gets you to level two. And at level two, they call you a certified marketing Insider. And by the title insider, you're obviously starting to think, oh, there's something more involved here, I'm going to be part of a group. And that's because at this level, you get access to the network of other certified marketing insiders. So it's a LinkedIn group that you're then invited to. You also have new events put on by LinkedIn that are available to you. Now, these are digital events and you can and should start attending the events that you see. You also get access to a bunch of resources. There's guides on how to use LinkedIn business manager, there's getting started with document ads, there's all about the LinkedIn Audience Network. So lots of great reading material that you can get read up. And you get here by passing all of the certification, the fundamentals, the marketing strategy, and the content and creative design tests. So really not hard. Like I said, you could get to this within a day. But once you're here, you now need to attend quarterly virtual events. So you don't want to miss those. They don't happen all the time. You're also expected to participate in the insiders group on LinkedIn. So make sure that you're in there actively participating. Okay, here's the quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into what it takes to get to level three certified marketing. 8:03 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, want some of that investment back? 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. Just go to B2Linked.com/apply and we'd absolutely love the chance to get to work with you. All right, let's jump into the level three certified marketing expert. And this is a little bit of a misnomer, because this is actually two level. Because once you get here, you'll become what's called a certified expert in training. There's even a badge for that. And this is actually a little bit funny. But I really wanted to rush through this level as fast as possible, because I didn't want to have no training on my badge. So I didn't even post this certification to my profile. But you remember those quarterly events that I was talking about in the previous one? Well, these are still really important at this phase as well. Now you need to attend all of the expert training workshops as they come along. You also have to host your own training session about LinkedIn fundamentals as part of this training. And don't worry, LinkedIn provides you with materials to make that a lot easier, but you do have to lead a training whether internal or external. You'll get periodic communication from the LinkedIn team. And they want you to make sure you're filling out surveys and questionnaires so they're learning along the way. And currently, you're required to participate in an in person event in order to fully fulfill the requirements of the certification. Okay, does that sound like a lot of work to you? It certainly did to me as well. But here's what you get for unlocking this level. Number one, you get to be showcased on the LinkedIn Marketing Lab site, you'll be invited to attend regional certified marketing experts networking events, and you'll get the certified marketing experts badge that you can attach to your LinkedIn profile and just generally be very proud of. It's not currently clear how many of the quarterly events that you need to attend. So I'm sure LinkedIn is still working this out. But suffice it to say, this needs to be something that you're focused on and committed to. I should also mention that it takes a lot of LinkedIn resources to put together these regional events. So we don't know how often these are going to happen and in what regions. All of that to say, it's probably really important to make sure that you are in every one of these quarterly trainings, and really active in the group. Those are the things that I think you can do to stand out to make sure that you get invited into this group. And then of course, once you get the badge, your job isn't over. At this point, I get to call myself a LinkedIn Certified Marketing Expert, but I don't get to keep this forever, unless I actually keep up on it. So to keep it up, there are compulsory and optional activities to maintain my standard is what LinkedIn lists on the website.  still need to attend all of the quarterly events to make sure that I'm keeping my certification. So yeah, you'll see me there. I also need to keep hosting these LinkedIn trainings at least once per year. And although it's not currently a requirement, LinkedIn does share that they want success stories shared with the insider's community. So there you have it, this isn't something that you willy nilly do and then check off. You've got to attend all of these quarterly meetings for the foreseeable future. You'll have to retake the exams every two years, and keep up on it. So it is a time investment. But I've always loved certifications, because they are an implicit nod that yes, you are an expert at what you do and you can be trusted to talk about these topics. I totally see everyone out there who's a LinkedIn Ads expert wanting to make sure that they also have this badge to back them up that they're not just some fly by night, showed up yesterday, decided to come out with a course. Okay, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around. 12:19 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. Like we talked about in the episode, if you look in the show notes, you'll see the URL to go and actually get set up and on your path to becoming a LinkedIn Certified Marketing Expert. If you or anyone you know, is looking to learn more about LinkedIn Ads, check out the course that I did with LinkedIn on LinkedIn Learning, all about LinkedIn Ads. It's by far the highest quality and the lowest cost course out there for LinkedIn Ads. Now you did just hear me talk about LinkedIn certification program, and how they have essentially a course and it's free, you should definitely go take those especially because you need to for getting the certification. But I will say the course that I did with LinkedIn is much more complete, and walks you through from the beginning, all the way until your setup and advertising well. But the link is there in the show notes. If this is your first time listening, I want to welcome you. Thanks for joining us. Please do hit that subscribe button if you've liked what you're hearing, so that you hear every episode as we come out with. But if this is not your first time listening, I would encourage you I might even go as far to plead with you. Please do leave us a review and rate the podcast. It helps the algorithms weigh more than any of us understand. And this is how you can do your part to share this material with other marketers out there who need to know about LinkedIn. With any questions, suggestions or corrections, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. I'm cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Microsegmentation Episode Follow AJ on LinkedIn NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Youtube Channel Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript What standing in the way of your prospect buying your B2B product or service. It's the buyers committee. Today on the LinkedIn Ads Show, I'm going to teach you how to turn these into advocates instead of roadblocks. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! In B2B, we can reach the end user, but most often, someone else needs to sign off on the purchase. We call these individuals, the buyers committee. And although our end user really can campaign internally to try to get the deal done, it can be very profitable to help them along. On today's episode, we're going into detail about who the buying committee is and what we say to them. And make sure to stick around to the very end, as I'm going to share the exact methods of targeting that I use to reach the buyers committees. Let's go ahead and get started. First in the news, we got an email back on March 15, from Romina Bin Mac Donnell from LinkedIn. And she said that on May 22, message ads will begin to sunset. And you may experience slower campaign delivery. As I'm reading into this, it's probably something like a quarter of the profiles on LinkedIn are going to be sunsetted each week. I think many of us are used to LinkedIn having things roll out on Tuesdays, it looks actually like things are starting to get rolled out on Mondays instead. Because May 22 is a Monday. She said as of June 19, advertisers won't be able to create new message ad campaigns. And then by July 31, message ad delivery totally ends. So there's going to be that gap between June 19 and July 31, where you can't create new message ad campaigns, but they will still deliver to that last few people who still have access. In the past, we've talked about the new ad format that's replacing them being called click to message ads. It looks like they now have a new name. They're called conversation starter ads. And she says, "Conversation starter ads are a new messaging ad format that appears as a rotation of ads in a fixed placement in the inbox. They encourage members to click to initiate conversations in the focus tab. And they will replace today's sponsored messages. As with message ads, conversation, starter ads will not be available in the EU." Now this is AJ again, I was really hoping that this new ad format would allow us to start advertising in the EU that maybe somehow they made it around the GDPR regulations, but it doesn't look like that's the case. She goes back on to say, what action should I take? To minimize disruption to your message ad campaigns, we encourage you to switch from message ads to conversation ads by June 19. And this is all 2023, obviously. Conversation ads will automatically evolve into conversation starter ads, starting on May 22, with availability increasing over time. Conversation ad campaigns require no attention at this time. I'll definitely have more to share on these because we are in the beta for conversation starter ads. So I'll have more info to share on that in the next few weeks. On March 20, we noticed several of our client accounts had access to the new AB testing tool. If you've been listening for a while you may have heard us talk about this. This is a tool that we've heard LinkedIn talk about for years now. Well, it looks like it's actually just been rolled out. If you don't have access to it yet, just wait because it's probably being rolled out a quarter or a sixth at a time. And again, launching on Mondays. So check your account. If you don't have access check next Monday. The way you can check to see if you have access to this tool is you go under test in campaign manager and then when you go to click on create test, we used to only have brand lift test, but now we have AB test. The call out inside of campaign manager says test different variables like your ad format, your creative content, your audience, or ad placement to see what performs best. As we dove into it to see what kinds of tests we could create, I was actually really disappointed. And that's because you can choose to test an ad or an audience against each other or a placement against each other. But even if you do ads testing against each other, the test says it will automatically create two campaigns to test the two versions of your chosen variable. So that means you can't just AB test your current creative inside of a single campaign. It's going to arbitrarily create two brand new campaigns that after the test is over, these are just cluttering your account. We are very much proponents of an evergreen account strategy, trying to reuse campaigns whenever possible. Because those campaigns you're investing spend and trust and history into them and by continuing to use those, not only to keep the clutter of your account out. But it also allows any new ads I launch inside of that campaign to start with higher relevancy scores to cost less and get better reach right out of the gate. So we have yet to test the new AB testing tool, but I would love to hear from you guys what experience you have. Same thing, if you've already run any of these conversation starter ads, please reach out to us. We'd love to hear about your experience. I wanted to highlight one review. Nunosbpereira mentioned that this is the best LinkedIn podcast. They mentioned, "I've learned practically all I've had to learn through this podcast, what an amazing resource" and Nunos I wasn't able to tell from your username, who you are or where you're located, but I just want to say thank you so much for leaving such a glowing review for us. It absolutely warms my heart to know that our podcast has been such a great learning resource for you. Alright, for those of you who have not left a review, I want to feature you so make sure you go and leave a review for us. With that being said, let's go ahead and hit it right into our main topic. So we're obviously talking about the buyers committee. And this is predominantly a topic in B2B. But B2C also has a buyers committee, it just doesn't function the same way. In business to business, we have these buying decisions that are more complex, they're decisions that take longer and involve more people. More often than not a B2B purchase decision is one that is more expensive. So we have these larger deal sizes and the purchases being made through a budget, rather than coming out of someone's wallet. We know that buying is a decision that is very much made emotionally. But in B2B, oftentimes, we're still going to buy emotionally, but we just have to rationalize it to others, the end user is still going to be affected emotionally by their pain point. And then that end user has to convince everyone else in the buyers committee to move the deal forward. I love this about B2B that these decisions are made from a budget, meaning that it's already been set aside for and our end user is just trying to make decisions about which tool or which product ends up being taken from that budget. I also love that the deal sizes are large, and that it's a more complex sale, because that's more data for us to be able to analyze. And as I'm sure you know, I'm a huge data geek. In business to consumer there is still a buyer's committee Ask anyone who's done door to door sales, more often than not, you'll hear, I got to check with the wife or I've got to check with the husband or the partner. So we know that there is this buyer's committee happening. But now we need to understand who it is who makes up the buyers committee. First off, we have the end user, I call this person the pain feeler. They're the ones who experience the pain that your product or service alleviates or solves. Then generally the boss of the end user gets involved in this decision. They're the first line of defense the first person that the end user has to convince. Lots of times the boss's boss gets involved in this decision as well. Everyone who's responsible for that budget may have to provide some buy in. Then if it's a large enough purchase, which in B2B, it usually is there's usually someone involved from finance. In larger companies that might be someone like director level or manager level in finance. But in smaller companies that might go directly to the CFO or the VP of Finance. Large companies usually have a role set aside for purchasing or onboarding from vendors. And they usually have a title dealing with buying or procurement. It's a standardized role for onboarding new vendors. If you're targeting smaller companies, oftentimes, the main decision is being made by the CEO or the founder or someone else in the C suite. Alright, so who else could be in the buyers committee? One of the ways that we've found to be really successful is talk to some of your sales reps because your sales reps will find out who it is who's standing in between them in their deal. Listen for statements like, well, I need to get sign off from x, from some role, or some person in the organization. Make a list of all of those types of roles that tend to be in the buyers committee. And you can take them into account in your marketing. We're obviously talking about how to leverage the buyers committee within LinkedIn Ads. So I want to give you a recommendation that we want to reach the buyers committee with ads. So let's talk about what the value is for reaching them. First off, brand awareness helps a ton for the buyers committee. The way this works is if someone signs off on a deal or with a vendor, if that vendor or deal doesn't perform, it's a risk to them looking bad because they signed off on that vendor that didn't end up performing. By the time this deal crosses someone's desk. You want them to be able to say, oh, yeah, I've heard of this company before they must be legit. Otherwise, they may feel like they have to go and do more research. And if they have the power to shoot down or veto the deal, if they come across something that makes the vendor look less trustworthy, they may just shoot the deal down right there, then it's going to be a lot harder to convince the buyers committee why they should go along with the deal. So here's the campaign setup that you might want to have for targeting these buyers committees. First off, these should be a separate campaign, because you don't want to intermix your messaging that's going to your end user, or what we'll call your your ICP. And this is for three reasons. Number one, you want to report differently because this traffic is going to perform quite differently than when you're targeting your end user. Number two, we like to use micro segmentation of your campaigns for more control and visibility. And number three, we definitely want to hit them with different messages, and maybe even different offers than we would target with our ICP. What about ad formats? You're probably going to want to hit the buyers committee with ad formats that are more friendly to a brand awareness kind of approach. You want to get them brand familiar, but you're not necessarily asking them to take action. For this, I absolutely love using text ads. They're super low cost, and they're really high on impressions and frequency. The big downside here, they're only going to show on desktop, and most users on LinkedIn or on mobile anyway, so you may not be able to fully reach your buyers committee, but it's a great assisting ad format. Next, I think sponsored content makes the most sense, usually single image ad, but I could totally see a video or a carousel ad doing good awareness work here. Sponsored content is more expensive than text ads. So costs are going to be higher, and click through rates might actually be lower than when you're targeting your ICP. And you probably don't want to expect conversions. Although it's not too uncommon to have conversions come in, because someone in the buyers committee wants to go and answer questions for themselves or do their own research. You could also do dynamic ads, especially follower ads, or even spotlight ads. And they are a little bit more costly than text ads. But I could definitely see someone from the buyers committee following the company because they want to learn more about it before they make the purchase decision. All right, here's a quick sponsor break and then we'll dive into how to message the buyers committee. 12:21 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. If you're a B2B company and care about getting more sales opportunities from your ideal prospects, then chances are LinkedIn Ads are for you. But the platform isn't easy to use and it can be painfully expensive on the front end. At B2Linked, we've cracked the code to maximizing your ROI while minimizing platform costs. Our methodology includes building and executing LinkedIn Ads strategies that are customized to your unique needs, and tailored to the way that B2B consumers buy today. Over the last 11 years, we've worked with some of the largest LinkedIn advertisers in the world, we've spent over $150 million on the platform, and we're official LinkedIn partners. If you want to generate more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, book a discovery call today at B2Linked.com/apply. And we'd absolutely love the chance to get to work with you. Alright, let's jump into the messaging and calls to action that we can use with the buyers committee. First off, what messaging would you use, as you're talking to the buyers committee, we find that more often than not our ad copy when we are targeting the end user or our ICP, they have a pain that needs to be solved. And it's a very specific pain. But the buyers committee, they're oftentimes aware of this pain, but they don't experience it intimately the same way that your ICP will. They understand it in concept they've heard about this pain through meetings or emails or something. But you can still talk to this pain at a high level. And your call to action from these ads are likely going to be things that are more like learn more than download now. And you want to help them be brand aware rather than having to ask them to take action. Don't be too worried by these folks not having high click through rates. The goal here isn't a click, the goal is to be in front of them as often as it takes to gain their mindshare. What about offers? What are you offering these people? Well, obviously, we talked about your call to action of learn more, but you could send them to a blog post or a web page or more about the company. It could be a video to tell a story. Obviously we know in marketing storytelling is so powerful. Any way that you have to tell the story of why your company is trustworthy and why it can help solve this pain. It's going to be an asset to you. We would highly recommend don't gate anything here. Everything you share, make it ungraded because you don't want to add any friction. All right, I've got the episode where you sources for you, along with our recommendations of exactly how to set up your targeting to hit the buyers committee. It's coming right up, so stick around. Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 15:24 For the resources from this episode, Episode 65 of the podcast goes all into micro segmentation so if you have questions about that as a strategy, or how you can use it on LinkedIn, go check out that episode. If you or anyone you know is just getting started with LinkedIn Ads, check out the course that I did with LinkedIn on LinkedIn Learning, you'll see the link in the show notes. And it is by far the highest quality and the lowest cost course out there. If this is your first time listening, welcome, so excited to have you here. Make sure you hit that subscribe button so that you're hearing all of these episodes as they come out. But if this is not your first time listening, please do go and rate and review the podcast on whatever podcast player you have. Most of the time this is done on Apple podcasts. That's where the majority of the reviews come in. And that is by far the best way that you can say thank you. It's a zero cost way of supporting us. With any questions, suggestions, or corrections reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. All right, as promised, here's the targeting of how we go about to actually reach the buyers committee. First off, we want to use company name targeting, because usually we know the name of the company that we're already talking to, so we can type in up to 200 company names or we can upload a list as a matched audience. And you can have up to 300,000 companies when you're doing the match audience. Then you'll probably want to layer on the roles at those companies. More often than not, we use a combination of the job function and the seniority ways of targeting on top of those companies. And that's because it's the broadest way to reliably target. And we want larger audiences here, because we're targeting by company. And since targeting by a limited number of companies usually results in a smaller audience size, we want to maximize that and reach as many people as we can, that could be part of the buyers committee. Otherwise, we're going to be paying higher costs. And it's going to be harder to get in front of the people that we want to be aware of our product. Remember, we're not being stingy here, we're trying to reach as many people as we can, as opposed to campaigns that we might run to our ICP, where we want to be totally specific to those who are most likely to have our pain point. But with these buyer committee campaigns, we want to be a little bit broader. So you'll be targeting the end user in your other campaigns, these are the pain feelers. But you also want to reach their co workers. A lot of times, that's the job function and the seniority of your pain feeler. And of course, you can exclude the individuals on a contact list so you're not reaching your pain feeler here. But I would argue that it's not a problem if they're seeing your ads as well here. But you want to reach their department and level. You're gonna get your pain feeler and their co workers in their department. Next, you want to hit their boss, and maybe even their boss's boss. So that's their job function with one or two seniorities up. So let's say that the person who feels your pain is the senior seniority. When you get to reach their boss, you want to get manager and director. If you're working with large companies, you can go after the procurement roles. So that's a job function of purchasing. And you probably want to use either all securities, or maybe everything, but entry level and training. If you're at small companies, and you want to hit the CEO, you want to use job function of business development, you heard that right, and then add a CXO, or a C level seniority, that's gonna get you the President and the CEO at the smaller companies. How about in finance? If these are smaller companies, you're probably going to want the VP and above, VP and CFO level finance. If you're targeting larger companies, it might be someone more like a senior or a manager or a director level. I've got a little bonus hack for you here. If you have a contact list that you might upload to LinkedIn, to be able to target a bunch of these individuals, what you can do is if you have their company address, the @companyname.com, in Excel, you can strip that out and leave just their company's domain name, then you can turn around and upload that as a matched audience as a full company list. So that's how I would take something that would have been a list of contacts, and we've turned it into a list of companies to go after. Just a word here on audience sizes. So let's say that there's 10 people at each company who you could feasibly see as being in the buyers committee. That means to get over the initial hurdle of needing 300 people in your campaign so that you can launch, you'll end up needing at least 30 companies on this list just to get over that. So realize we're not going to be spending very much on these audiences anyway. Even if you might have to pay a higher cost per click, or a cost per impression to get in front of them. You'll probably have to bid higher anyway, because these ads aren't nearly as relevant to your buyers committee as they will be to your ICP. Alright, hopefully those were really helpful hacks. We'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Drew Boyd's LinkedIn Profile Positioning interview with April Dunford April Dunford LinkedIn Follow AJ on LinkedIn NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Youtube Channel Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript Over the hundreds of LinkedIn Ads accounts we've managed, we've seen a lot of companies fail. Today we're talking about what you can do to make sure that your approach is built for success 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! I don't like to admit defeat, but after managing hundreds of LinkedIn Ads accounts, unfortunately, we've seen many companies fail at LinkedIn Ads. My definition for fail here is this is client churn for us where after they work with us, they stop advertising on LinkedIn completely. Analyzing these failures, as well as many, many successes, thank goodness, we found the common denominators, the essential components to this success. We'll go through each one of these in a lot more detail. But here are the essential components. Number one, the client needs to be clear on their ICP or their ideal customer profile. This means they understand their pain and who they are. It's our targeting in LinkedIn. Number two, they clearly understand the value they offer to that audience. They have product market fit. And number three, they know how they're competitively positioned in the market. So today, we're gonna dive into ways that you can research and develop your ideal target audience, and figure out what messaging will work in your ads. We're addressing your go to market strategy as it relates to LinkedIn Ads, but this is also going to relate to your entire business, your whole marketing approach. In the news, we've heard some really great feedback from our last episode, and I'm so glad that you all enjoyed it so much. It was the one on bidding and budgeting. And afterwards, I got a great question from Steven Owen, who manages demand generation at a company called Getac. He smartly asked about manual CPM bidding, since we didn't cover it in the episode. And I didn't cover it because when I want to do CPM bidding, 99% of the time, I'm already using maximum delivery. There are times though, when you might want to use a manual bid, when you're bidding CPM. So because we didn't cover this in last week's, I wanted to quickly answer it here for you. So when I want to use CPM bidding, I tend to use maximum delivery, like I said, 99% of the time, because when you're bidding CPM, it's just the easiest way to do it. The trick with CPM bidding is that your bid needs to be high enough to secure you in the top placement in the first ad slot. But not any higher because then you'll be overpaying. And that requirement of being in the first slot is really important, because that's where CTRs are the highest. And when we have high CTRs is exactly why we're bidding CPM anyway. So this is absolutely crucial. But when you do manual CPM bidding, you get more control. You may remember from our holiday traffic study that those who are still using maximum delivery over holidays, their costs spiked way up. And that's because on maximum delivery, the platform is going to bid as high as it needs to on CPM to spend your daily budget. So if you want to be insulated from those market forces, you can bid manually, that's just one of the few ways that I can think of where you'd want to do this. Another reason could be that you can get better pricing manually bidding than you can with maximum delivery. So if you do want to do manual CPM bidding, I like to do some variation of this. So I'm going to look at the suggested bid range. And I'm going to set my initial bid at kind of mid to high in that range. Because like I said, I want to make sure that we always show up in the top slot, then I'm going to run ads. And the next day, I want to look at my effective cost per click. And remember, your effective cost per click is what you paid for your clicks, regardless of if you were bidding by cost per click. So if I'm bidding a CPM of $90, for instance, and I go and look at my effective cost per click the next day, and I see that it was $16. But I realized I could have been paying $15 If I was bidding by manual CPC, then I'll try lowering my CPM bid by five ish dollars, I kind of tend to move in $5 increments, then I look at my effective CPC the next day to compare it to the previous, if your effective cost per click went down, then you can try bidding even less and see if you can get a cheaper cost. So in this case, I would lower my CPM bid from 90 down to 85 and see. And if my effective cost per click is now at $15, I could say well, let me see what happens if I drop this down to an $80 CPM bid. You probably also want to try increasing your bid. So let's say I bid $95 CPM for a day and measure and see what it did do my effective cost per click. And the reason for this is if you're ever falling into a second ad slot, that's six or seven posts down the page, and fewer people are going to make it that far, meaning that your click through rate will be likely less. Which when you're bidding CPM, you're counting on getting the best click through rate possible. It is a lot of babysitting and hand holding to your campaigns to constantly be changing your bids, and constantly trying to find where's that sweet spot where I pay the least amount for my clicks. And that's why I like maximum delivery, when it's available of course. But if you're willing to do all of this work, you can get costs lower by doing it. It just requires some attention and patience. I wanted to highlight a review of the podcast. Valentin QWP, he left a review that says, "Best marketing podcast. I found AJs podcast a few months ago, and the content of the podcast is gold for anyone managing a LinkedIn ads account. This is definitely the most useful marketing podcast nowadays." Valentin, thanks so much for leaving that review. And I will tell you, that is very high praise. Anytime that we can have the most useful podcast in marketing, I'm in. I really appreciate that. If you're a regular listener, and you haven't left us a review yet, please do because I want to feature you and give you a shout out. All right. With that being said, let's hit it. First, we're talking about getting clear on your ICP, or your ideal customer profile. This is important, because if you're not speaking to your correct audience, your ads will fail, period, end of story. Think about it like this, the value in LinkedIn ads is this precise audience targeting. And we pay a significant premium for that opportunity to laser focus on exactly the right people. But if you end up targeting people that won't ever be your customer, you'll never be able to get a return. Occasionally, we'll onboard a client. And when we ask them about who it is that they want to target, they may not know. And sometimes we'll prod and we'll dig a little bit deeper. And they may turn it back on us and say, well, you guys are the marketing experts. And I'm certainly not complaining here. This is a dynamic that just naturally happens when you're an ad agency that works with a wide variety of industries and companies. But I can say for certain, and I'm sure you'll all agree that just because we're marketing experts, we're not experts in your specific industry, or with your exact target audience. And we're definitely not experts in your company's offerings. Given enough money and time, we can become experts in all of these things. But if the company doesn't already know its audience intimately, it's likely going to take 10s of 1,000s of dollars in ad testing, and many months of time to get to that point. So if the marketer already knows their audience, then we can just jump immediately into success on the platform. So we can show run ads, but you get to decide is your goal in running LinkedIn ads going to be audience testing, trying to figure out who it is that we need to target? Or is your goal demand generation and actually reaching the right people and driving your business forward? So if you don't already know who your audience is, how do you find out? Well, ideally, your founder is already a clue here, because your company founder or founders, they started the company based off of solving a problem that likely they themselves faced. So you can reason who are the types of people who feel this common pain that the audience suffers from. We can think through the possible roles, who would feel the pain or be responsible for the pain that we saw. Sometimes it's easy, and we're right, right out of the gate. Sometimes certain industry segments or certain company sizes have a bigger need or feel the pain more, or maybe they just have the budget to solve the pain. To give you an example, we have a client who built this awesome technology. It can read any document if it's handwritten or digital, whatever. And it uses AI to grab all of the data from those documents and pushes it right into a digital format that the company can read. The product is called Pixie Docs, in case you're curious. So we targeted several industries that we thought would have a great use for this technology. We reasoned that insurance providers will likely want to use something like this if they're getting bids from other vendors. And of course, they're always trying to keep costs as low as possible when they're replacing things that customers have made claims for. So we started targeting those insurance providers with ads. And several revisions later was sponsored content ads, we were still getting like a 0.2% click through rate, which as you likely know is about half of the benchmark. So I knew we were failing. So we went to go talk to the head of sales and asked for some insights about this industry. Why can't I get click through rates above like .25% He ended up asking a couple prospects. And they told him that they already make all of their vendors enter the bids right into their system. So all of that data is already digitized. So they don't feel that pain point that we saw. That makes perfect sense. But it's something we just couldn't have known without getting to know those prospects better. Let's talk about product market fit. And you can ask yourself here, are people buying your product? Are they happy and satisfied with it? Sometimes, like we've talked about the founder has created this product to solve a pain point. And it's probably one that they felt, but your product market fit is, is it a significant enough pain that people will seek out a product to solve it, or they're willing to pay enough that it's in your best interest to solve that pain point for them. And if you don't have this product market fit, no amount of advertising is going to save it. I feel like in business to consumer, product market fit is oftentimes easier. Think about it, you open a pizza restaurant because everyone needs to eat. And there's a lot of people who live in this area. And my guess is if you took a poll, probably 95% of people would say that they like pizza. Now if you own a pizza restaurant, I'm not saying that this is easy. But you can imagine you have product market fit right out of the gate. This is much harder in business to business. Sometimes it's really hard because we don't have detailed understanding of what your customers are experiencing, especially in different industries. And sometimes founders go and create a solution to a problem they felt. But you find out later, they're the only ones who feel that problem, or they were the only ones who felt it strongly enough that it was worth seeking out a solution for so you may need to validate your product market fit and ask yourself serious questions as a founder, like is it possible I'm the only one who struggles with this particular problem, or so many people feel it, but it's not acute enough that people are willing to open up their wallets to solve. Sometimes your solution is really valuable to those in different industries that you didn't predict. With Pixie Docs from our previous example, for instance, we stumbled across the medical industry. We found that doctors offices were struggling with onboarding new patients. You know, when you go to a doctor and you fill out a bunch of paperwork on a clipboard and hand it to the receptionist, well, then that receptionist has to enter in all that information into the computer and they get backlogged. But then it holds up things like patients getting their prescription. So it's a significant pain point. So we found some great success targeting them. And the founders never would have thought when they were building this product that they were building it for medical practices. Now, I've described a little bit in these examples how we can use LinkedIn Ads to validate the pain points of the business. In this example, with pixie docs, we were targeting multiple industries segmented out as separate campaigns. And that way, when I ran a report inside of Excel, showing general performance by industry, I could look at it and say, wow, there's this one industry that has really low click through rates. And here's this other one that's shining. So that is a way that you can use ads to validate. Once you've found an audience, you can run different messaging against them until you find out what sticks. If you're at a very large company, you may have budget to do actual market research. You can conduct focus groups or customer interviews. If you remember episode 87 when we were talking to Andrew harder at Cisco, he was talking about how he used customer interviews and didn't have to spend significant budget on market research. He just conducted his own. And I think that's super cool. You can send out surveys, you can do these interviews. You can even use social listening platforms to understand what people's pain points are. These are all ways that you could potentially validate. Alright, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into how to communicate this value to your potential customers. 13:47 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. If you're a B2B company and care about getting more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, then chances are LinkedIn Ads are for you. But the platform isn't easy to use, and can be painfully expensive on the front end. At B2Linked, we've cracked the code to maximizing ROI while minimizing your costs. Our methodology includes building and executing LinkedIn strategies that are customized to your unique needs, and tailored to the way that your B2B consumers buy today. Over the last 12 years, we've worked with some of the largest LinkedIn advertisers in the world, we've spent over $150 million on the platform, and we're official LinkedIn partners. So if you want to generate more sales opportunities from your ideal prospects, consider booking a discovery call at B2Linked.com/apply. We'd absolutely love the opportunity to get to work with you. Alright, let's jump into communicating value. So if we're speaking to the correct audience, but we're not saying what they're going to respond to, we're gonna fail. We need both. We need the correct packed audience, and we need to be saying the right things. So how do you actually learn what they want to hear? And how do you get them to take action? The way you do this is you have to understand your audience. And there's no shortcuts here, you have to understand their pain points, acutely. What keeps them up at night? What words do they use in their vernacular to describe their problem? When you actually know who your customer is, you gained two superhuman ability. Number one, you know how to talk to them. And number two, you know what you can offer them that they'll pay attention to, because it'll help solve their problem. Most of you who are listening are marketers. So I'm going to try to use an example I came up with the if someone targeted you with ads, and they said, we help marketers get more unique loads of their HTML file. Sure, I can interpret what it is they're saying. They're saying that they can get me more unique visitors to the website. Everything in that is technically accurate, but they've entirely lost my trust and credibility, because they didn't use the same language that marketers use and the I'm already comfortable with. If they don't know the terms that I use, do I actually trust them to actually be good at what it is they do? Probably not, that ads gonna feel a lot like spam. So once you actually understand your customer, how do you talk to them? I'm a big fan of Drew Boyd, I got to attend a workshop by him where he walked me through the values framework. I've mentioned Drew on the show before, but he's a marketing professor and a LinkedIn Learning instructor. And he's absolutely phenomenal. He ran me through this exercise that totally blew my mind. He had me get a bunch of sticky notes of different colors, and arrange them all over the wall of a conference room. At the bottom, we started by placing basic product features and spread them way out. Then up above, we listed all of the basic benefits that customers get from each of those features. So for instance, if I were doing this with the iPod, I could have put a sticky note at the bottom that says feature 16 gigabyte hard drive. And of course, the iPod was famous for not putting in their ads, that this has a 16 gigabyte hard drive, therefore you should want it. They understood that people want it for the benefit. Then up above that we list the high level of benefits. We're talking about how these benefits get a little closer to home. In our iPod example, we might say 8,000 of your favorite songs in your pockett. Follow so far? Okay, good. Then at the very top, we listed the values that those high level benefits lend themselves. What value as a person would make you perfect for a product that could provide this high level benefit. So in this example, I could say, my value is I'm a music lover. I value having my music library, everywhere I go. I could do this for all of my features. And then all of the benefits of high level benefits and nailed down what are those common values that my customers have. And now if my job were to write ads for the iPod, I could write a very powerful copy. Because I understand the things that our ICP really values, and I know how my product benefits them. I would highly recommend running through this exercise with your company's features, benefits, and values. You should also realize how important it is that your message coincides with where your customer is, in their journey. If people are just in the very beginning of their journey, understanding your brand, your message is going to be very focused on value proposition. If they're in the consideration phase, though, they're probably asking different questions and feeling different things that your content needs to address. Anytime your ad is just listing benefits, we call it benefit dumping, it's going to come across very much like an ad. But if we can take those benefits and weave them into a story, it's a lot more interesting. People are programmed to pay attention to stories. I think we have to hit on brand positioning, because it's not enough to figure out what value that you're offering to your target audience because your competitors can offer that same value, or at least they can say they can. So you need to clearly articulate how what you provide is different from anything else on the market. And I'm not discounting this because as a business owner, I realized this can be really scary. You'll come up against legitimate thoughts and concerns like, well, if we declare exactly who we're ideally for, will that alienate potential customers and our revenue? Will it turn away some of our current customers? So it's definitely worth sincere thought here. Someone who speaks to positioning very well is someone by the name of April Dunford. We highly recommend checking out her content. And in the show notes, we've linked to an interview that she's done. Okay, so once you understand your brand positioning, and who your ideal customer is and what they care about. Now, you can start crafting offers and remember by my definition, An offer isn't something like a percentage of or a coupon. The offer is what you're offering your prospect in exchange for their attention. So an offer could be anything from read this blog post to buy something now to anything in between. If you want to dive deeper into offers, go back to Episode 10 of the podcast that was all about offers. All right, I've got my last little bit of advice for you on this topic. So make sure you stick around all the way to the end of the episode and I'll share those with you. Okay, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around 20:37 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. So you'll want to go down and look at the show notes below. I've listed a link to Drew Boyd's LinkedIn profile, so you can go check him out, follow him there, check out his LinkedIn learning courses. They're insane. We've also linked to an interview that April Dunford did for winter.com called How To Make Any Offering Obviously Awesome. We've also linked to April Dunford LinkedIn profile, so you can go follow all her great content there. If you or someone you know is brand new to LinkedIn advertising, I highly recommend that you share with them my course on LinkedIn Learning all about an introduction to LinkedIn Ads. You'll see the link in the show notes. It is by far the highest quality course at the lowest cost possible. If this is your first time listening, welcome, I would love to invite you to subscribe to the podcast, so you'd never miss another show. But if this is not your first time listening, please do rate and review the podcast, especially on Apple podcasts. Not to guilt trip you or anything here, but we spend hours and hours prepping every one of these episodes and this is all we ask of you is please leave us a review. It's going to help the show in the algorithm so more people get to find out about it. With any questions, suggestions, or corrections reach out to us at podcast at B2Linked..com. Alright, with that being said, hear my last thoughts on this episode. As you're trying to figure out who it is who's your ICP? What do they like? What do they care about? What do they value? And how you're positioned to help them. It might be a little disheartening to realize that there's no guide or completion meter letting you know whether you've done it sufficiently or effectively. And honestly, this process is never complete. You're always learning more about who your audience is, and especially how they're changing. So you have to keep testing and developing. But I do know this for sure. The sooner you get started, the sooner you'll be having a lot more success. I'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: New Interests for Interest Targeting Explanation of CPC vs CPM bidding on LinkedIn Relevancy Score and Auction Episode Follow AJ on LinkedIn NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Youtube Channel Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript You're paying way too much for your LinkedIn Ads. Today, we're going to fix that. We're talking about bidding 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! For those of you diehards who've been around long enough to have listened to Episode Six, it was all about bidding and budgeting, and it was our most listened to episode of the entire series. Well, things have changed with bidding a good bit since we recorded that episode back in early 2020. So I definitely think it's time to refresh ourselves on the topic. Not to mention, I'm a very different podcaster after 89 episodes. And so I'm excited to have one of the most important topics covered in an episode where I don't sound nearly as awkward Bidding is the number one reason that advertisers are paying too much for their ads on LinkedIn. And this is incredibly important to master because this is something that really affects your bottom line. The strategies and principles that I'm sharing with you today came after I'd spent over $30 million on the platform. So these learnings are well earned, and I'm excited to share them with you. We've now spent over 150 million on the platform. And we just continue to fine tune these. So make sure to listen to the very end of this episode. Because at the very end, I'm going to give you my framework for how to get the lowest costs from LinkedIn ads every time. In the news, you may remember back in episode 87, we mentioned that the new feature called website actions was seen out in the wild, and that it might be part of a beta. Well, I got confirmation from Mark Gustafson this week that it is indeed in beta. So if this is something that you're dying to get access to, then reach out to your rep. And Mark, thanks for that correction. There was a new post on the LinkedIn ads blog this week by Jae Oh, and Jay is definitely someone that I'd love to have on the podcast. So we'll see if I can get him on in a future episode. But he posted all about the new release of interests for LinkedIn targeting, we've linked to the whole article down below in the show notes. But he basically explained the interest targeting on LinkedIn in three different categories. He talked about general interests, service interests, and the newest product interest attributes. They launched over 20 new service interests, and over 120 new product interests. He said, you can now fine tune your campaign targeting with over 400 professional interest categories. For product interests, he mentioned that there are 18 categories to choose from. And the initial focus is software, which makes a lot of sense, because when they rolled out product pages, they were exclusively for SAS software,. Makes sense that that's where they would be getting the data from. And they go down to subcategories that zero in on specifics, like you mentioned, data visualization software, revenue management, software, sales, analytic software, etc. Under the new service interests, it's all about engaging with services pages, they launched with their initial set of about 20 categories that includes services such as real estate, environmental consulting, and app development. So if this is interesting to you, definitely go check out that article, I want to highlight one of the reviews, Patrick Alessi who's the Head of Customer Success at ProfitMetrics.io in Denmark. He left this review. He said, "AJ is clearly an expert in his field. Listening to this podcast has already given me a lot of tips and insights that I didn't have before". Patrick, thanks for that, I'm turning a little bit red. I'll move on here. If you're a lover and a listener of the show, and you haven't left a review for us yet, please go and do that, especially on Apple podcasts. I know I say it every episode. But it really helps with the algorithms of getting the show mentioned and shown to new people who haven't discovered it yet. The biggest compliment that you can pay us is by leaving a review and help other advertisers find the show. And of course, if I can figure out who you are, when you leave your review, sometimes you can't tell from the username, I'll give you a shout out. So I want to feature you. Alright, let's go ahead and get to the topic. Let's hit it. First, we need to talk about the different bid types that are available the ways that you can bid. The default is called maximum delivery. And it used to be called auto bidding back years ago, and I actually liked the term auto bidding better than maximum delivery, but whatever, I was not consulted. The way that maximum delivery works is you pay by the impression and LinkedIn bids as high as it needs to in order to spend your daily budget. It's the default option for most campaigns. And it is the most expensive way to pay for your traffic about 90% of the time from the studies we've done. It's only available for sponsored content, which is your newsfeed ads. But if you're anything like us, the vast majority of our budget ends up going into sponsored content. So it'll feel like a lot. Next, we have manual bidding. And with manual bidding, you can pay either by the click, or by the 1000 impressions. The concept of being able to pay by the click is what put Google Ads on the map. I absolutely love getting to tell people that when you're paying by the click, you don't pay a dime unless LinkedIn can get someone to actually take action. What LinkedIn does is it gets as much traffic as it can at your maximum bid until it hits your daily budget. Although many of us know it regularly overspends daily budgets, manual cost per click bidding results in the cheapest cost per click from LinkedIn about 90% of the time. So I get really comfortable with manual bidding. And I suggest you do the same. What's interesting about manual bidding is it's actually a hidden option. I joke about this, but in a campaign, you'll see under bidding, maximum delivery and cost cap bidding. And then there's an option that says more options. And when you click that, it reveals manual bidding. So this is effectively a hidden option, because it's an option that takes up one row that LinkedIn has hidden with a toggle that takes up one row. Obviously, this means that it was hidden intentionally. If you're listening to this podcast, I'm imagining that you are an advanced advertiser. And this is by far the best option for advanced advertisers that are looking to improve performance. It does take more work, but boy, it's worth it. When LinkedIn costs what it does to be able to get costs down 20, 30 50%. You'll also notice a little checkbox under manual bidding when you select it that says enable bid adjustment for high value clicks. And if you hover over the little question mark there, it says it allows LinkedIn to bid up to 45% higher to capture someone that LinkedIn thinks is most likely to convert. I would argue that this data is very limited on who is actually high value so I usually uncheck the box. In theory, this works the same way that target cost bidding used to work. But we'll talk about that here in just a moment. The option in between is called cost cap bidding. And LinkedIn says, "With automated cost cap bidding, you can set your maximum cost per key result. Oour bidding system will deliver as many results as possible at or below that price point." So of course, this sounds really cool, so we went and started doing a bunch of tests. And although they were limited, we tested cost cap against manual bidding, where we left the bid exactly the same. And in every case, we ended up with the same volume, but our costs were just higher. So I can't recommend cost cap bidding. But cost cap bidding replaced target cost bidding, and it went away a year or so ago. We never found success. In fact, the results that we had were very similar to what cost cap bidding is now. It appears to act very similarly. And I'm not sure why they took it away and replaced it. But in order to give it a different name, they must have changed something significantly on the back end. But we can't really tell the results are so similar to cost count bidding. Now, right underneath your bid type. You'll also see something called optimization goals. Those of you who are really experienced with Facebook advertising, you might remember the old bidding method on Facebook called OCPM, or optimized CPM bidding. OCPM on Facebook was awesome. I absolutely loved it. And what it did is it allowed you to pay Facebook's really low CPMs. So you're bidding by CPM, but the auction system is optimizing to show ads to those who are most likely to click. So you've really got the best of both worlds pay on low CPMs. While the advanced system found those who are most likely to click, it resulted in really low costs per click is fantastic. When you change your optimization goal to landing page clicks while you're bidding with maximum delivery, this is effectively the same thing as Facebook's old ocpm. The difference here though, is that LinkedIn CPMs aren't cheap. And I don't think that LinkedIn data is nearly as good at Facebook's about who's most likely to click. You can also set your optimization goal to impressions, which means you're telling the system to optimize towards showing as many impressions as possible, which isn't really an optimization. It's more of just what the ad platform is meant to do. But based off of your objective, you may also see some additional optimization goals. Like if you're in a video views campaign, you can optimize for video views. If you're in the brand awareness objective, you'll notice that you can optimize towards reach meaning hitting as many different people as possible rather than showing the same message the same person over and over. If you're in lead generation, you can use the optimization goal of leads meaning bid on those who are most likely to actually fill out a lead form. With website conversions, you can optimize towards people who are most likely to convert and then under sponsor messaging ad formats, the only optimization goal you get is sends, which is basically like optimizing for impressions. The system's not having to think too hard. So your optimization goal and your bidding strategy can change based off of the objective and your ad format. And there's way too many permutations to cover here. But for example, under the brand awareness objective, if you want to run a dynamic ad, let's say a spotlight ad, you'll be limited to just impressions as your optimization goal. Whereas under any other objective, you'd be able to set clicks as your optimization goal. And many people don't know this, but you can run a video ad under a website visits objective. If you set video views as your objective, you're limited to only being able to bid by the video view or by the impression. But if you put a video underneath a website visits campaign, you can set an optimization goal of landing page clicks, which is a cool hack. Okay, with that groundwork being laid, we can talk about how bidding actually works. If you haven't yet, go back and listen to episode 72 about relevancy score on LinkedIn, and how the auction works. We get really geeky into it. So when you start manually bidding, which again, I recommend about 90% of the time, it works on the basis of an auction. And LinkedIn calls it a second price auction, which is the same model that Google engineered back at the very beginning of Google Ads. And the logic goes like this, an impression comes up for auction. So let's say someone from your target audience just logged into LinkedIn, they navigate to their feed. And now LinkedIn hosts this very fast auction, that just takes a moment to let all the advertisers who want to show up in this user's feed to start to compete. Whoever wins this auction wins that impression. And then when someone eventually clicks on their ad, they end up paying one cent more per click than the loser the second place person would have paid. Whether you win the auction or not, it's a combination of your relevancy score, which is how well LinkedIn says that your campaigns are performing and your bid. If you have a high performing ad, meaning that it gets a high click through rate, it means you don't have to bid as high to get traffic. If your ads are low performing. It may feel like pulling teeth to get LinkedIn to try to show your ads or LinkedIn or show them but you get gouged by crazy high costs. So under this auction system, you show enough impressions that you start to get clicks and other interactions on your ads. And since you're bidding manually, you pay no more than what you bid. So you might be asking yourself, if that's the way the auction works for manual bidding, how does it work on maximum delivery or auto bidding? Maximum delivery is cost per 1000 impression bidding where again, LinkedIn gets to bid by the impression and bids as high as it needs to to spend your daily budget. This feels like a little bit of a conflict of interest to me, just imagine handing your wallet to LinkedIn and trusting them to only take as much out of your wallet as it really takes to advertise. It's not gonna happen. Since you're bidding by the impression and you're bidding high. LinkedIn doesn't even need to hold much of an auction for you. Because the whole auction environment, it's a way of maximizing profit among advertisers who are bidding only for performance. But when you're bidding by the impression, the auction doesn't care how your ads are performing, or performed in the past, because it gets paid handsomely guaranteed, just for showing your ad. So bidding this way, it's far easier to get traffic, you'll notice that it takes far less babysitting your campaigns to spend your budget. But because you're bidding so high on CPM, it leads to a much more expensive, effective cost per click 90% of the time. If you want to see how all the math works here, check out the YouTube video that I linked to below. It's all about CPC versus CPM bidding, and you can really see me nerd out. Now I've mentioned a couple times that maximum delivery is more expensive 90% of the time. But what about that 10% of the time that it's actually more efficient. We've found that that break even point starts when your click through rates get to two to three times the benchmark for that ad format. That of course means you need to know what your benchmarks are. So go check out episode 15, in case you missed that. And that click through rate of two to three times that's an average sometimes with more competitive audiences, we find that you have to be performing more like three times the benchmark. Alright, here's a quick sponsor break and then we'll get to dive into the advanced bidding tips. 14:44 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com. The LinkedIn Ads experts If you're a B2B company and care about getting more sales opportunities from your ideal prospects, then chances are LinkedIn Ads are for you. But the platform isn't easy to use and can be painfully expensive on the front end, which is probably why you're listening to this episode. At B2Llinked, we've cracked the code to maximizing your ROI while minimizing the costs you pay on LinkedIn. Our methodology includes building and executing LinkedIn Ads strategies that are customized to your unique needs, and tailored to the way that B2B consumers buy today. Over the last 11 years, we've worked with some of the largest LinkedIn advertising budgets in the world, we've spent over $150 million on the platform, and we're official LinkedIn partners. If you want to generate more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, book a discovery call at B2Linked.com/apply, we'd absolutely love the chance to get to work with you. Let's jump into those advanced bidding tips. When you're bidding manually, I recommend usually bidding significantly lower than what LinkedIn recommends, I'll just remind you the average cost per click on LinkedIn is usually between about $8 to $14 per click in North America. So if LinkedIn is telling you that you need to be bidding $25, $40, $60 per click, you really don't have to trust that advice. It's bad advice. If you have a giant budget like Fortune 500 or if you have really small audiences, oftentimes you will have to bid significantly higher to spend those budgets. For instance, we know that we can't fill our budgets with bidding near the floor if someone's budget is more than like $10,000. So generally, I suggest bidding low and then if you're not getting enough traffic, then start to increase your bids. But many of you have asked me about starting by bidding high and then backing down. And I used to recommend this strategy, because by doing it, you can kind of pad your relevancy score. But I don't recommend it much anymore, just because of how much money was wasted during the first few days because of how much money was wasted during those first few days of bidding really high. I found that LinkedIn relevancy score will eventually shake out. If you have good ads, chances are, even if you're bidding low, the system will learn that you have good relevancy scores, even if you're bidding low. Sometimes if the ad platform gets it wrong, like if we're bidding low, and the platform gives us poor relevancy scores and so we see that the ads just aren't getting served, oftentimes, we'll pause those ads, and we'll relaunch exactly the same ads. We call this refreshing. So that's a tool in your tool belt. But if your ads are good, and your audience is tight, performance should be good and you shouldn't have to try to trick the relevancy score algorithm. Alright, let's talk about budgeting. So when you're doing manual bidding, you'll see that there's a daily budget. And there's also actually a lifetime budget, but we'll get to that. But when you're doing manual bidding, your daily budget is effectively just a safety net, that shuts your account off and takes you out of the auction, so that you stop spending. And LinkedIn will allow itself to spend over 50% of your daily budgets, which I think is a little bit excessive, but hey, I'm not on the back end. When bidding manually, I like to set my daily budgets really high, just to get it out of the way because the last thing you want to happen is your daily budget kicks in, shuts your account off before you actually find what that campaign is capable of spending at your bid level. Then after a couple days, you can analyze where you're hitting spend wise, and you can either lower your bids, or raise your budget, or maybe even both. So that's under manual bidding. But how does daily budget work when you're using maximum delivery? Well, this way, it's very simple. You set a budget, and it hits it or likely exceeds. Unless your audiences happen to be pretty small, then it might not actually hit it. But on small audiences watch because those costs per click, you might be paying $50 per click, since maximum delivery gets to bid so high. Keep an eye on that. So we mentioned lifetime budgets. If you've been listening for a while, you've likely guessed that I'm a fan of daily budgeting. I love that control that it gives us or the evergreen advertising approach that we recommend. When lifetime budgets first came out, it was back when a campaign would expire when it hit its lifetime budget. And when it expired, there was no bringing that campaign back from the dead. If that campaigns results ended up being great. You'd be recreating that bad boy from scratch. accounts would be littered with 10s or hundreds of unusable campaigns. They took up space and they weren't good for anything except for reporting. So to work around them, I used evergreen campaigns with daily budgets. And if for whatever reason I didn't want to keep running ads to a certain audience, I would end up pausing that campaign and I can resurrect it again in the future by simply unpausing it. And this does mean that you have to be consistently paying attention to the account. If you try to do the set it and forget it thing, you can end up overspending budgets. And this works out great for us because managing LinkedIn Ads is all we do so we don't mind having to have to look at an account every day. But I realized that there are those of you out there who manage multiple channels, and maybe don't have the bandwidth. And if that's you, then lifetime budgets can be okay. But here's how lifetime budgets work. For example, if you have a campaign that you want to give a lifetime budget of $1,000 to, the campaign then goes and tries to spend that $1,000 and then shuts off. This can happen over the course of one day, or it can happen over the course of two months. It's really just however long it takes based on your bids. Now you can set a daily budget as well. So let's say you set a daily budget of $50, and a lifetime budget of 1000. So it would try to spend the same $1,000, but it would pace it out over about 20 days. But of course it could take longer. I do like this level of control better if you want to use lifetime budgets, because blowing an entire campaigns budget for the month in one day is very difficult to explain to a boss or a client. So back to budgets when we're manually bidding, let's say that you have a $50 per day budget for a campaign. If you're bidding too high too aggressively, you could spend that entire budget by 5am, before the workday is even started. And on top of that, of course, LinkedIn reserves the right to overspend your daily budgets by 50%. So it could be even worse, you could spend today's and tomorrow's budget by 5am. If you're not bidding aggressively, if you're bidding more on the low end, that budget should last all day. Daily budgets with maximum delivery bidding are a little bit different. Because what you put in is your daily budget, LinkedIn is going to bid as high as it takes to actually spend that. Whereas with manual bidding, if you're only bidding, let's say $8 a click, and you have a budget of $50 for the day, if people just aren't clicking, LinkedIn is not going to do anything to try to get you to spend more towards that $50 mark. You might just spend $14 for the day and be done. And of course, there's a lot of back end logic that goes into this calculation, which is probably one of the biggest reasons that LinkedIn recommends not trying to time your campaign by pausing them and unpleasing them at different times of the day. You can imagine that if max delivery is trying to spend your budget by the end of 24 hours, if you pause your campaign until the beginning of the work day, and then pause at the end, you may only end up spending half of your daily budget, which would obviously be confusing for that algorithm. With manual bidding, though we don't have the same issue, which I actually really like. As a reminder, daily budgets work off of UTC timezone, which is in the UK. Now I'm here in the Western US, I'm in the Mountain Time Zone. And so when a campaign has hit its daily budget for the day, it turns back on fresh at 5pm. So you can spend the entire day's budget before the day actually begin. I really, really don't love that. In fact, I actually really hate it. All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up, along with my framework on how to get the lowest costs from LinkedIn Ads 100% of the time. That's coming up right after the resources, so stick around. 23:23 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. Alright, like we mentioned in the news section, the article from Jae Oh on the LinkedIn ads blog all about the new interest targeting, you'll see a link to that. You'll also see the YouTube video that I did on CPC versus CPM bidding. You'll get to see all of the complex math behind how that calculation works. Episode 72 was all about relevancy score and the auction. So you'll see a link to that. Make sure just in case you missed that episode, you go back for it. If you or anyone else is looking to learn more about LinkedIn Ads, maybe you're just getting started, check out the course that I did with LinkedIn Learning all about LinkedIn ads. It's by far the least expensive and the highest quality course out there. If this is your first episode you're listening to, welcome! We're so excited to have you here. Make sure you hit that subscribe button. But if this is not your first time you've listened, please do consider rating and reviewing the podcast. Like I mentioned earlier, it's by far the best way that you can say thank you for the hours and hours that it takes to put this podcast together. With any questions, suggestions or corrections reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. So here's the framework I've been telling you about. Marketers really love frameworks so I'm giving you one of my favorite campaign launch frameworks. This works with any size of budget, any size of campaign, and it's designed to produce the very lowest costs on the platform period, 100% of the time. Get ready to take now notes. So you start out by bidding a campaign with manual CPC bidding. And I recommend significantly lower than the recommended bid range. In North America, maybe start around the $7 to $8 mark. And you set a budget that's significantly higher than what you actually want to spend. And don't worry, you likely won't actually be hitting it so don't be worried about it being sky high. I really like to set my budget so high during this initial testing phase, just to get it out of the way. You might be asking yourself, well AJ, how high? Here's my rule of thumb, I want it high enough that there's just hardly no way that it'll ever spend it, but not so high that if it did spend its budget, that I'd lose my job. So I launched my campaigns with that low manual bids with high budgets, and day one to one and a half will probably be the learning phase. So you don't want to touch your campaigns during that. The results from day two, though, should be pretty informative. On day two, you compare your actual spend for those campaigns with your desired budget. Now, notice, I didn't say your daily budget, I said your desired budget. And that's because I told you to set your daily budget higher than you actually want to spend. And that's because you don't want your daily budget to get in and shut your campaigns off mid day, you want to get a good feel for that audience's ability to actually spend based off of your bid level and your ad performance. For example, let's say that you set your daily budget at $200 per day, and you're actually wanting to spend about 50, at the end of day to look and see how that compares, did you weigh under spend the $50 mark, it means your bid likely isn't aggressive enough to reach enough of that target audience. Or it could be that your audience is just too small to spend that budget. I'd recommend increasing your bids by one to $3 per click, just depending on how severely you understand. What if you just kind of understand what it does mean that you'll need to bid higher to get into the auction enough to spend your budget. And here, you don't have to increase your bids quite so much. You could try increasing them by 10 cents to $1. What if you actually hit your desired budget for the day, it means that you're bidding at just the right level to spend your daily budget. And this is the holy grail. You just found out how to bid low enough to get the best pricing, but high enough to spend your whole budget and get scale. What if you actually spent higher than your desired budget though? Well, lucky you. Even at a low initial bid, you still overspend. And that means that you get to lower your bids even more and get even cheaper traffic while you're still spending your daily budget. Depending on how much you overspent by, you can lower your bids by again 10 cents to $1, or maybe a few dollars. There's no exact science here, you've got to make changes and see how the campaigns respond. Now as soon as you're comfortable spending your desired budget, then go ahead and lower your daily budget to match your desired budget. Or maybe lower it to a little bit under since LinkedIn can overspend your budget. And now your safety net is back in place. Oh, doesn't that feel good. Now you've let this campaign run for a few days, I like to look at a three day uninterrupted stretch. Now I want you to look at your click through rates. Do you have any that are consistently way above benchmark? With sponsored content campaigns, I look for click through rates that are over 1%. With text ads, I look for click through rates that are over .045%. If you get one of these, hurray, you can now switch to maximum delivery bidding. And this will actually start saving you money. And like we've discussed before, maximum delivery bidding is really convenient, it's a lot easier to use as an advertiser, then watch over time. Because if you have another three day stretch, where your click through rates are falling below that point at which your click costs became cheaper. Then you want to switch back to manual CPC bidding, and then rinse and repeat. The reason this happens is over time when you show your ads to the same people, they get less and less likely to click. And we call that saturation. You can go check that episode all about AD saturation. But this could happen over a week. It could happen over a month or two months. So you have to keep your eye on click through rates over time. And I reevaluate, I go through the same process. Every time I launch new ads or new offers since they're sure to change the click through rates, which then changes the relevancy score, which changes where your bids need to be in order to spend your ideal budget. If you launch new ads, and they get click through rates that are significantly higher, that's great. That means you're probably going to get to go and decrease your bids and get even cheaper traffic and still spend what you want to spend. Or maybe you launch new ads and they don't spend what you want them to, you can go and reevaluate by increasing your bids a little bit. Maybe you've been talking to your rep and your rep has been saying, no don't bid low because you'll end up getting bad quality leads. This is, from our experience, absolutely false. Without fail, every time we've tested lead quality associated with bid levels, we find no difference in lead quality. If you find that there's a difference though, go check your targeting, since you may inadvertently be letting people in who aren't part of your ideal customer profile, your ICP. So that's the framework. I hope you love it. Hope you took great notes. With that being said, I'll see you back here next week. I'm cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Job Title Targeting Nuances Workplace Learning Report In-Demand Skills Civil Rights Day (MLK Day) Ads Analysis Follow AJ on LinkedIn NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Youtube Channel Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript Did you know that the LinkedIn Ads definition for a video view is different from LinkedIn organic definition, or that a senior seniority isn't very senior at all? We're covering 11 things on LinkedIn Ads that don't mean what you think they mean, 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! The LinkedIn Ads platform continues to evolve. It's really coming into its own as a tier one channel, truly ungrateful. That being said, there are still several areas of the platform where LinkedIn's definition of something is not going to match up with your likely definition of that same something. In today's episode, we're going through the 11 areas to be on the lookout for so you can make sure that metrics and campaign manager don't lead you astray. First in the news, LinkedIn recently came out with their workplace learning report. And it's actually based on LinkedIn Learning. And you'll find the link below in the show notes. It was actually a really complete report. And I read through it, and the one conclusion I came to is surprise, we're in a fast paced industry, and we need to keep learning and growing to stay ahead. The good news is, if you're listening to this podcast right now, which you obviously are, it means you likely already understand this. So I congratulate you for being in the top 1%. LinkedIn also released their 2023 most in demand skills. And this is based on skills that people are looking for in their job postings, and probably also based off of the skills that people have in their profiles that only LinkedIn has access to. And again, really no surprise here, they mentioned that things like social media as a skill are in demand. The problem with the skills on LinkedIn is that so many of them are so broad, that I don't even find them valuable to draw trends from, let me know if I'm off base and you disagree. But check out the report, as I've linked to it in the show notes as well. Also continuing from the popularity of our analysis around the holidays here in the US, we just published an analysis of ad performance around Civil Rights Day, or Martin Luther King Day here in the US. And that's live on the blog right now. Go check it out if you want to see the trends. And as a sneak peak, Superbowl and Valentine's Day are also coming up. So stay tuned. I want to highlight one of the reviews. It was left by the user name Giugiugiu. And they say, "AJ is probably the best LinkedIn Ads expert on the market. I attended one of his workshops in Boston a couple of years ago and I was in aw. I finally found someone who knows how this tool works. He's funny and very good in explaining all the functionalities. Absolutely the go to resource if you're starting with LinkedIn Ads. Thanks, AJ for sharing your knowledge." Well Giugiugiu. I wish I knew who you were. So I can thank you specifically. But I really appreciate the super kind review here, me and my whole team, we try so hard to explain the functionality very simply, and so grateful we can be a resource to you. A huge thank you to everyone who's been reviewing the podcast lately. It's really picked up aand I really, really appreciate. And if you haven't left a review yet, please do it. I want to feature you live here on the podcast. Alright, without further ado, let's hit it. 3:20 Like we talked about in the intro, we're talking about the discrepancies that you might find in the platform today. So let's say that there's a discrepancy in the platform. Why does this actually matter? Why do you actually need to know about these discrepancies? I think it's really important to know what you're actually reporting on. You obviously want to make decisions with accurate data so that they're the right decision. You also want to have confidence in your data. That way you can defend it if you're challenged. An example that I come across really often in digital marketing is the bounce rate in Google Analytics, because it doesn't mean what you think it means, unless you've actually done like the Google Analytics training courses. I don't know if the definition has changed for Google Analytics 4 that's rollout. But with Universal Analytics, a bounce just meant that they didn't go to another page. So if you're sending someone to a landing page where the whole goal is to get them to convert, then it actually makes a lot of sense that you have a 95% bounce rate. I want you to be able to digest accurate information, because you're actually using this data to go make decisions. It's not good business to be heading the wrong direction at anytime. So now that we're in agreeance, that this is actually important stuff, let's jump into the first one we have. 4:34 Sponsored Messaging Ad Formats under Performance So sponsored messaging ad formats, if you're under the default look for performance, you really can't trust much of the data there. Anything relying on a click is just totally boldface wrong. If you listen to episode 79 about the B2Believe event that happened in November, you know that LinkedIn announced some big changes in Q2 2023. So this may or may not be relevant in the future, but I'm guessing it is, I'm guessing this is still going to be an issue. So if you're looking under performance, if you look at your clicks, as well as your cost per click, and your click through rate, it's actually calling an open a click. So you might look at your sponsored messaging and say, wow, we have a 55% click through rate and our cost per click is less than $1. I hear this a lot and tend to just shake my head, because definitely, that's not what's happening. What's happening is they're measuring your open rate and your cost per open, which isn't very valuable if you ask me because people will open it just to mark it as read. But a valuable definition for a click to me is actually someone taking action on the ad. That means clicking on some sort of a call to action that I've given. The simple solution here is under the performance column. Look under sponsored messaging. There, it actually breaks out your sends, your opens, and your clicks, and gives you the proper metrics. So this is one that's actually more or less been fixed, if you're looking under the right column's breakdown. 6:05 Conversion Column Another one that we come across really often is you're looking at the conversions column, trying to decide your cost per conversion, or your conversion rate and decide if that's good or not. It's very important to understand that the conversions column should actually be called total conversions. Because it's not just conversions, it's made up of your click through conversions, which is great. That's exactly what you want. But it also includes your view through conversions, which, depending on your campaign, depending on the other channels you're running may or may not be conversions that you actually want to attribute to your LinkedIn Ads. The solution here then is to go to the columns drop down and select conversions and leads. You'll of course, see the conversions column, but right next to it, you'll see your click conversions and your view conversions. So when I'm taking my data and doing an analysis, I'm gonna throw this data into Excel. And then I get to decide which column I actually care about. And most of the time, I'm going to use my click conversions column, instead of just my conversions column. As an agency, I would be so embarrassed to go to a client and tell them that yeah, we had 10 conversions when they look in their CRM and see that there's only four. And then I look like I'm lying. 7:21 Clicks Column The next one is somewhat related. And that's just looking at your clicks column. Because the click metric actually changes as your objective changes, I think it should be called chargeable clicks. If you're using the objective of engagement, the definition of a click is any click that happened on that app. So if someone hits like on your ad, or clicks to go see your company page, all of those are going to be called clicks. But if you're using the website conversions objective, a click is actually a lot more indicative of what's happening, because that was someone who clicked on your call to action that took them to your external landing page. If your objective is lead generation, just like engagement, you'll notice that any click on your ad becomes a chargeable click. And these tend to go unnoticed because they have such a high conversion rate. But you really should know. And that means that if you go and look at your cost per click metric, and your click through rate metric, they're affected the same way as well. So if you're looking at multiple campaigns that have more than one objective, your metrics are definitely being skewed, it's almost like you have to look at the metrics for each objective separately. When I get this data to a spreadsheet, I choose one metric to unify all of my definitions. So instead of just using the clicks column, I like to use landing page clicks. And you can find this under the engagement column drop down. Inside of campaign manager, it's called clicks the landing page. And of course, it's just another column when you do an export to Excel. But when you're looking at the engagement drop down, you'll see that there's one called other clicks. We don't know everything that counts as an other click because you'll see a lot of other types of clicks there that have their own columns. But most of the time, it's when you have an ad that has the ...see more at the end, because your text was truncated for being too long. Other clicks is someone extending that. All right, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into more discrepancy. 9:20 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts 9:29 If you're a B2B company and care about getting more sales opportunities from your ideal prospects, then chances are LinkedIn ads are for you. But the platform isn't easy to use, and can be painfully expensive on the front end, at B2linked, we've cracked the code to maximizing ROI while minimizing your costs. Our methodology includes building and executing LinkedIn Ads strategies, customized to your unique needs, and tailored to the way that B2B consumers buy today. Over the last 12 years, we've worked with some of the largest LinkedIn advertisers in the world, we've spent over $150 million on the platform, and we're official LinkedIn partners. If you want to generate more sales opportunities from your ideal prospects, book a discovery call today at B2linked.com/apply. We'd absolutely love the chance to get to work with you. 10:21 Video Views All right, let's jump into video metrics because there's a lot interesting here. Like I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, the organic definition and the ads definition for a video view, are very different. If you post a video either from your company page or personally, and then you look at the views that have racked up, a view as anyone who watched at least three seconds of that video. But the definition for a view in Ads is two seconds with 50% of that video on the screen. And if you're curious why the definition for ads is shorter, realize that when you're bidding by video view, LinkedIn only gets paid when someone counts as a view, hence why they'd want to make it 33% shorter. 11:03 Video Completion Percentages And then how about the definition for video completions because this is something that has been changed very recently. If you're looking at the formula for a 100% completion rate of your video, that's calculated using your completes divided by your starts. This means anytime the video started, whether it made it to two seconds or not. So of course, it would make sense that your view rate is going to be your views divided by starts. Well, it's definitely not your view rate is views divided by impressions. To see how much this is actually affecting you, go compare your impressions to your views and your starts. And you'll see sometimes this can make a really big difference. 11:47 Organic Stats Another one dealing with the organic stats, you may or may not already know this, but when you post something that's not a video, your posts show the number of impressions that that post got, that means the number of times it showed up in someone's newsfeed. But anytime that you post video, it shows views which are very different. Like I said, go compare your impressions to your views, you might find that one video gets one view for every four impressions, you might find another one gets one view for every one impression. So they can be very different. 12:22 Forecasted Results Column How about as you're actually building a campaign, you'll notice over in the right hand column, there's a section called forecasted results. We actually had a client recently who was upset that their results didn't match the forecasted results. So I think this is really important to point out some people are looking at these like their gospel. What you need to understand about the forecasted results column is that these numbers are not based on your performance. They're based on your bid and your budget, your optimization goal, and your audience size. But because they don't actually take your performance into account, it's wildly inaccurate. I'll give you an example. If you know that when you launch ads, you get click through rates that are like 1.5%, you'll look at those forecasted results and they'll say, oh, we expect that you're gonna get a click through rate between .45% and .6%. But if you have a click through rate, that's more than double what they're predicting, you'll likely get cost per click way lower, and you'll likely get served a lot more than what they're predicting. It really needs to take into account your performance before giving you forecasted results. Plus, as we were playing with it, we found that it was blatantly wrong in several cases. The example that we looked at, it was predicting that cost per click would be lower when bidding by impression than it would have if we were bidding by click. It showed an expected click through rate of .45% to .6%, which is not in the range where bidding by impressions would be cheaper. So there's some bad math going on here behind the scenes. I do hope that someone from LinkedIn will look into that. But as a reminder, don't bank on these figures. They're not based on your performance, or your audience. These are simply something to let you know what you might expect, probably for the most basic brand new advertisers. 14:08 Rotate Ads Evenly Alright, let's talk about rotate ads evenly. Because in theory, it sounds really interesting. For me, I love AB tests. I love to test things. And to get an accurate AB test, you really need to have both test versions shown about the same amount of times. So of course, when you're editing the campaign, and you're on the ads page, when you see that little cog and you click it and it asks you if you want to rotate your ads evenly or optimize for performance. If you're like me, naturally you'll want to say oh yeah, I do want to rotate my ads evenly. There's a major reason why you don't want to do that. I call this the charge me more and show me less button. Here's why it acts like that. When it says it's going to rotate your ads evenly, it's not showing your ads evenly, it's entering them evenly into the auction. And here's the big difference. Each of those ads gets its own relevancy score from LinkedIn. And LinkedIn won't tell you what the relevancy score is. The only indication you get is at the campaign level from a campaigns report. So let's imagine that one of your ads has a relevancy score of four, and the other one has a relevancy score of six. If you select the option for rotate ads evenly, you're forcing both of those ads to go into the auction in even number of times. But the ad that has a relevancy score of six is going to win more auctions at a cheaper price. And when you're forcing the ad into the auction, that only has a relevancy score of four, it's going to lose more auctions, and when it does when it's going to have a higher cost associated with. So the net effect here is that when you are running this option, you'll notice your overall costs per click will rise. And your overall impressions will fall. For years, LinkedIn have talked about a new tool that they're going to come out with, but I think they're going to call like the AB testing tool or something. And I do hope this solves the issue here because we don't want to mess with the auction. What we want to do is show our ads evenly so that we can get accurate tests. So I do expect that we'll be able to have some sort of a solution for this in the future. 16:19 Senior Seniority The next discrepancy here is in seniorities. You'll notice that there's a seniority called senior seniority. And people tend to think that this means like an executive, maybe in job titles like senior vice president or senior manager. But according to LinkedIn, that's not what senior means. It actually means individual contributor. This is someone who manages projects and things, but not people. And of course, LinkedIn doesn't actually know who is managing people and who's not. But they try to deduce this from job titles. In a past episode, we mentioned that dentists show up under the senior seniority, which I think is crazy. I remember I spent millions of dollars on the LinkedIn Ads platform, targeting the senior seniority, along with VPs, and C level before I ever realized. So take my learnings and go and save yourself some time and headache. 17:15 Super Titles Now, we mentioned this next one, on the job titles episode, when you're targeting a job title, you may be targeting a lot more than what you think you are. The way that this works is something called super titles. Titles on LinkedIn are a free form field. So people can go and write whatever they want. You can give yourself a cutesy title or a really standard one. And then to make this a useful feature for advertisers, LinkedIn then has to go and collect all of the job titles out there and stick them into buckets of common groupings that you might type to target a group of these people. And then they take it a step further by aggregating similar titles into something called super title. And the reason I think that this happens is it might not be a great user experience, if you went into job title, and had to select 50 or 60, similar titles to get who it is you want. They want you to select 2, 3, 4, 5, whatever, and then feel like you've accurately covered that audience. There are definitely some glitches, though, and how this works. I mentioned this back on Episode 60, all about job titles. But we noticed that if you target the Chief Marketing Officer job title, it's also going to include Marketing Consultant, job titles as well aand you can't exclude it. Because if you're targeting CMOS, and you do an exclusion of marketing consultant, job titles, your audience size drops to zero. 18:42 Company Size Targeting All right, next, let's talk about company size targeting. What you need to understand is when you are targeting by company size, you're only targeting by known company size. What that means is, if you're targeting by company size, let's say 11 through 50, the only people who can show up in there are those who are associated with a company who has gone and declared that it is size 11 through 50. And you may have noticed that there's a lot of people on LinkedIn who either aren't associated with a company page, maybe they wrote the company name in their company, but it's not attached to a page so it just shows up as a little like gray building as a logo. It means those people will not be part of this targeting. And the way this will rear it's ugly head is if you ever tried to use company size targeting as an exclusion, you'll be very, very surprised. Let's say you want to exclude small companies. So you exclude myself only through maybe 10 employees. What that's going to do, LinkedIn is going to go out and obviously try to target those that are 11 and higher, but it's also going to be targeting all the unknowns. The people who represent companies that don't have a company page, which usually tend to be smaller companies. So, you went in thinking that you were going to exclude small companies, and you ended up getting even smaller companies as part of your target. So unless you have a great reason for wanting the unknowns to be targeted, you don't want to use company size for exclusions. They're only for inclusions. Are you aware of any discrepancies that I might have missed here? Let us know by emailing us at Podcast@B2Linked.com and I'll make sure to include your feedback here in the next episode. All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up, so stick around. 20:39 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 20:50 All right, if you look down in the show notes below, you'll see links to these resources. Episode 60, where we talk about the nuances of job titles, that episode is definitely worth listening to. You'll also see a link to the workplace learning report that we talked about in the news section, as well as the in demand skills report. If you're hiring, or even trying to just improve where you are in your career, it might be worth checking those out, making sure you're making strides on those in demand skills. I mentioned the analysis that we did based on Civil Rights Day, or Martin Luther King Day here in the US to go read that on the B2Linked blog. If you or anyone else is looking to learn about LinkedIn Ads for the first time, go and check out the course that I did on LinkedIn Learning. You'll notice the link down below and it's by far the lowest cost and the highest quality course you'll find about LinkedIn Ads. If this is your first time listening, please hit that subscribe button so you don't miss the next episode. But if this is not your first time listening, please do consider going to rate and review the podcast. This is the very best way that you can support us and say a big thank you for the hours and hours and hours that we put into this show. With any questions, suggestions or corrections reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.  

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Follow Andrew Harder on LinkedIn Awesome viral post about LinkedIn document ads from Andrew Another excellent viral post from Andrew about this video strategy Certified Marketing Experts Certification Follow AJ on LinkedIn NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Youtube Channel Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript AJ Wilcox Are you interested to hear how LinkedIn Video Ads drive actual opportunities, not just leads? Well, you'll love this case study with Cisco 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! I get asked so often about video ads on LinkedIn. And the truth is that it's so hard to answer what works and what doesn't with video, because it's so very different from static. There are infinite ways to deliver a message through video. It sure makes it difficult to narrow down and find a set of best practices that we can then present to other marketers as a recipe for success. When a friend reached out and told me that he'd had extreme success with video ads, I was listening. Then he shared how video ads weren't just getting high click through rates or low cost per view, but they're getting him low costs per opportunity. Well, he then had my full attention. He's got gold to share. And of course, I wanted to share that gold with you LinkedIn Ads fanatics. Andrew Harder, and I have crossed paths lots of times in the past. He started out his career at Hanapin Marketing, the agency that puts on the advanced PPC conference called Heroconf, and also do the blog, PPCHero. I absolutely love this conference in this blog and I've been blessed to speak at hero comp for the last like six years. It's by far one of my favorite shows that I attend every year. I've also been blessed to be named one of PPC Heroes, top 25 PPC professionals for lots of years running. And Andrew wasn't behind any of those decisions. So don't worry, this is not a conflict of interest. But Hanapin got acquired by Brain Labs and they're a mega agency. He moved on and now he works for Cisco under WebEx events. I'm really excited to interview Andrew about his results at Cisco. So we'll dive into the interview. AJ Wilcox But first in the news, one cool feature. So one of our loyal listeners, Joshua Stout, from the Impactable agency, who consequently I actually got to meet last night when he and his team were in town for a team building exercise, and we got to go to dinner. But he posted this week that he got access to a new feature on one of his accounts and it's called Website Actions. If you remember from the B2Believe event, this was one of the features that was announced would be coming, but didn't let us know when it would be coming. So I was so excited to see it out in the wild. To check to see if you have it in your account, navigate in the left hand navigation bar, under analyze, and then look and see if you have a heading there for website actions. I have to tell you, this feature is going to be so cool. And the reason why, I have to ask you, have you ever tried to set up a conversion action as an event, not just as a thank you page that people land on and it triggers the conversion? To do it as an event, you have to put a bit of JavaScript on the button that you want to track. And if you're like me, you don't happen to know JavaScript, it's a whole lot of troubleshooting, and wasted time, and no way to tell whether it's implemented correctly. What this feature does is it scans your landing pages to find buttons on the page, and then allows you to create any of those buttons as a conversion event just by selecting it. It works by having your insight tag installed on the page. There's no custom JavaScript, no wondering if it's set up properly, you just click an action and call it a conversion. This is one of those rare acts of brilliance by LinkedIn. I love the concept of this feature. I'm excited to get to use it. And it's also one of those features that I totally would have expected someone like Meta or Google to come up with. And yet we have it here on LinkedIn. Hurray. Justin Rowe from Impactable suggested that this feature may have been a result of the marketing analytics company called Oribi that LinkedIn acquired back in February of 2022. And that sounds totally plausible to me. Another awesome listener, Jay Rathell mentioned that he thought this was part of a beta so it might not actually be out yet. Your rep may have had to register you in the beta to get access. And I'm not sure what the truth is there. So just watch out in your accounts for when you get it. I wanted to give a shout out to Dig Altamiranda. Dig left us a review here on the podcast that says, "Best LinkedIn paid podcast ever. I love how AJ is unbiased and unguarded when sharing his expertise, the performance of my campaigns has definitely seen a boost since I started listening. And I will be a fan of the podcast for a very long time, a must listen. Dig, thanks so much for sharing that you've been able to take the things that you've learned from this show, and then use them to boost your campaigns and your performance. Well done. And of course, thank you for the kind words. It means a lot to me and the whole team who support me in the creation of these episodes. As a reminder, if this is not your first time listening to the show, please do leave a review and I want feature and shout you out as well. All right. Without further ado, let's jump into the interview with Andrew Harder. Let's hit it. AJ Wilcox I'm so excited to have Andrew Harder here. He's the senior paid media manager at WebEx events. It's a Cisco company. He lives in the Bloomington Indiana area. Andrew, I'm super excited to have you here. Andrew Harder Thanks, AJ been really looking forward to this thing. Thank you for having me. AJ Wilcox Oh, of course. First of all, tell us a little bit about yourself. Like give us the whole background. Andrew Harder Yeah. So have been in the PPC paid media world going on six years now. I had a few jobs post college, it was a little bit late getting into my current marketing career arc now. But I started at Hanapin, a small agency that's located here. That was actually how I first heard about you, AJ. So it's fun being on your podcast today. It's what little I knew about B2B at the time, like you were always the guy that we went to for resources. So yeah, I was there for about three and a half years. And then in the spring of 2021, I joined Socio, an event software company. And we were then shortly after acquired by Cisco, so hence the rebrand to WebEx events. But we're still a standalone software that's a part of the larger WebEx suite now, but I joined just to really run like their paid media. And it was just kind of search at first, but we've expanded a ton into paid social, especially LinkedIn, which is I know what we're gonna be chatting about today. So looking forward to diving in deeper with you. AJ Wilcox Awesome. Well, my roots with Hanapin go really deep. They're the ones who put on the Hero Conference. I've spoken there for years and years. 2023 is actually got cancelled this year, which, you know, just telling everyone else, which is so sad, because it's the first time we haven't had Hero Conference in a long time. I always look forward to that one. Hanapin was purchased by Brain Labs, like you were just telling me how many acquisitions they've gone through. They've been really growing a bunch of stuff, which is super cool for the digital marketing, but exciting background. So tell us about when you went to WebEx events? What kind of shape was the LinkedIn Ads account or the LinkedIn Ads initiatives before you got there? And what did you I guess, set up and start to do? Andrew Harder Yeah, so I mean, there technically was a few things that were just getting launched, like the month I started, but it was very bare bones, there have been a few like small tests here. And just kind of top of funnel content, and some like event promotions, like webinar promotions, but really, it was kind of a blank slate. So it was super fun. I mean, for most B2B brands, like searches, you know, priority in terms of driving MQLs and pipeline and revenue. So that was what I spent most my time with at first, but I was also only the fourth marketer hired on the team. So we didn't really have any content. There was another content marketer that started with me, but we're a team of four. And then because of the Cisco acquisition, we were able to grow really fast, and you know, just have a lot more budget. So our team then grew to a team of 20. So we had a content team, events team, it really took a while like having to think now. It was probably the first year I was there, it was just kind of adding in some more top of funnel content, promoting some things of course, like with the rebrand needed a lot of brand awareness around that, but there wasn't nearly the same level of like strategy as we have now. So we do have a lot more into video, but it was just kind of your traditional, like gated lead gen with some brand awareness. AJ Wilcox Very cool. Alright, so obviously, we have you on the show, because you've really knocked it out of the park in a lot of ways. I'm curious, what kinds of initiatives did you take on? After you came in you saw where it was at? You mentioned that you start some video, tell us how that all really progressed. Andrew Harder Yeah. So I mean, first thing, we hired another person to work with me because our budget and channels have gotten so large, so I was managing all like search and social and programmatic channels. And so we hired the amazing Krystal Marquez to work with me. And so she was a huge part of this transformation because like I said, we were just running just a lot of lead gen. There wasn't a ton of pressure for us to generate down funnel results. But we could do a lot more if we really started honing in on our audience on LinkedIn because, you know, for us, like we do have a few different ICPs but primarily like event marketing managers, field marketing, you know, a lot of those folks are on LinkedIn. And so at the same time, our events team was producing just amazing virtual events that we could use as like cut down. So I'm getting a bit head I think, but we started to put on paper, hey, we're gonna spend a lot of time analyzing our CRM, see what job titles were missing, and also, instead of having like, just like this large ICP audience, we're gonna segment that. So that was like kind of step one of like, audience segmentation. And then we also really want to talk to some of our customers, which is, like kind of a small step that's easy to gloss over in this process. But I think it was a huge part for us was, we wanted to actually talk to you. And we were able to talk to you like four different ideal, like customer profiles and different job levels. And really ask them frank questions about like the buying process, how they heard about us what channels are on, because we wanted to validate some of the things that we were going to do from a channel perspective, but also the type of content. And then we spent a ton of time cutting down these videos writing really like in depth ads. So it's not just, you know, slap a couple lines, hey, watch this video, like we really were taking the time of what's breakout, like, what are these nuggets that we can share with our audience. And so we spent a lot of time doing that. So that was a three month process really, of doing that. But before that, there was a lot of internal discussions about how we're going to change our strategy, and also took some work kind of convincing our bosses to to like, hey, we're going to take some of our lead gen budget, and we're going to start doing a lot of video where you don't get direct results from. AJ Wilcox Oh, yeah, so there's a lot of different areas. I want to dive in here. The first let's talk about this, what sounds like customer focus group or really market research. We just recently had an episode by the time this one comes out about market research. So this is something that's very top of mind for me. Did you go out and hire a market research firm to conduct this? Did you just grassroots say, hey, let's just start sending emails to our customers. How did you go about doing this Andrew Harder Super simple process, I'll break down that. Literally anyone can do, especially you're in paid media, you don't typically think of paid media folks doing this. But if you have, you know, whether you slack or whatever, internal comms, you need slack, you need Google docs. And that's literally all you need is an email. So like there's no hiring a firm or anything like that, it was I sent a message to our customer team, just asking for a list in for contacts of customers that would be willing to speak with us, and I prefaced it with hey, like, we're marketing. So they might think, Oh, they just want more case studies and things like that, which we do. And a lot of our customers are happy to do that. But I was framing it as hey, we literally just want to get some feedback for some things that we're gonna be testing out on social. And I got a list and I can't remember how many I was given, but we ended up being able to conduct 10 interviews over the course of like a month. And when I say 10, you might think, well, who cares? Like that's like nothing is a small sample size. I would say we have so much data like you know, we're marketers, we always want to be data driven, you can get that in the platform's, but really like spending half hour to an hour, with 10 different customers upwards of 10 hours of like, really in depth, going back and forth, you can discover so much more information. And also like we got a lot of ideas to from different types of creative that you want to test on LinkedIn and the types of content that we could go back to our content team and event team and say, hey, like people are talking about XYZ, are there plans for that? Do we already have some of that? And so it was super helpful, I would recommend that exercise to anyone. And also you'll be surprised if you have a great product you have for sure customers that are going to be happy to talk about it, especially if it helps them do their job better. Or for us like event software, a lot of event managers like have just horror stories of like, you know, event apps that didn't work or took super long time to get things set up. And so, you know, when they experience something that's a lot easier to use, or they're able to like justify ROI from their sponsorship, just like different things like that. They're pumped to talk about that, just like how I am as a marketer with different tools that we use in our everyday. So yeah, I would say do it. AJ Wilcox Did you have to offer them anything for their participation? Like a gift card or discount or anything like that? Andrew Harder Yeah, good question. So we didn't like have to I don't think. We offered, there's a WebEx merch store that actually does have a lot of cool stuff on it, so we offered like, I think it was like a $50 voucher to that. So it was just kind of like a thank you. But I honestly I would say probably all of those people would have done it without anything. But yeah, because we also do for anyone that's in B2B SaaS, like, we do a lot of reviews, too. Like we do gift cards, and like those reviews are great, but like, doing these actual like in person, or like through virtual, like those interviews, like it's so different than just, you know, filling out a few questions on G2. AJ Wilcox Yes. And what I want all the LinkedIn Ads fanatics out there to understand is, I don't want you to hear this and say, Well, of course, Cisco has the budget, to go out and hire market research firms and go and do all this, but I'm just a lowly paid marketer. That's not my job. I don't want you to let yourself off that easily. This is what Andrew did. He started this program as a paid marketing manager and did it by himself without a significant budget. And you heard him say he didn't even have to offer them anything for their participation. They would have been stoked to chat. But of course, it's always nice if he can offer something. So very insightful, like thanks for sharing us with us about the program. You also mentioned that you were cutting out video and that video was an initiative that you wanted to take on. First of all, what was spurred you to decide that you wanted to go all in on video? And how did you go about that? Andrew Harder Yeah, so I guess starting with kind of like the bigger picture reason why we did have a lot of I would say good solid image assets and different things that we were running like, it wasn't like we didn't have quality. But we knew, especially on LinkedIn, again, if your audience is engaged on it every day, multiple times, like, people do stop, at least I'm talking from personal experience, if there are videos, it doesn't have to be video necessarily, but for the sake of this conversation, like there are certainly that is about like other paid media, marketers talking about things that they do, or different tools, like I certainly, like, stop and watch those things. I don't like it. I don't like do anything to like, give LinkedIn, some feedback. So they get that, but a lot of times, you know, I send a Slack message to my team and say, hey, like, what do you think about this? And so one of the reasons why we really wanted to video was, we knew that we wanted to start, people use the term like creating demand, it might be a bit generous for what we were doing. But I do think we were really trying to like speak to just pain points and different like, ways that we could educate, who we were trying to bring in whether you know, they come in six months from now through a PPC click, or they come in through a different means or like, do they start falling on LinkedIn page, and then, you know, they click on us, you know, three, four months from now. We weren't so obsessed with like getting like this direct response from that it was really about taking these like 30 seconds, even upwards of like, two and a half, three minute clips of hey, there's a ton of virtual events, event marketer, and we're talking to you, how do you increase like virtual engagement awareness? How do you measure that? That's just one small example. But we were cutting this down. So we had that like focusing on like the virtual aspect, because our platform is virtual and person and hybrid speaking to, we have a lot of higher ed companies, a lot of member based organizations that their business or their event, like programs really run on sponsorships. And so like, we talked a lot about how to prove ROI from your event sponsorships how to, like get better at partnering with different sponsors, things like that, that were just very specific like one message. And this goes back to like the audience targeting we'd split this out. So instead of like this one large, like, okay, we want all these people, we knew that, you know, people that work at universities are very different than and they have very different event needs than someone who works at a fortune 500 company, doing a big internal event, or doing like, you know, their big summit, whatever they use cases. So we were showing these ads to all these audiences, because we had each event, we were probably cutting down like three to six different ads. And so we could see who was engaging with what so we're looking at all those engagement metrics, view metrics, and then this really allowed us to build a quality remarketing pool of people who were watched, like 50% of our videos, and we started so in the more and then we get some more like the product videos that were more like down funnel, and we saw a huge lift. And like we had like an overview video of our platform, when we just show that to a cold audience. Now surprised like, there's not a very good watch time. I don't have the numbers in front of me. But when we showed that maybe two, three, like remarketing sequences down the funnel, it was like 2 or 3x, higher, this small things like that. I'm just trying to give some examples of like what we were seeing. So as you can tell, there's a lot of stuff that goes into it. AJ Wilcox I love that. So you're talking about multiple step sequences. How did you set that up in campaign manager? Andrew Harder Yes, I guess preface this, we use metadata to run all of our paid social. So you can do all this natively. But what we were doing in campaign manager, you can, you know, create those remarketing audiences. So we could capture anyone that saw 50% or more of these videos. And then you know, it took a while when we first started, because some of these prospecting audiences we were targeting were not like super large. Also, we started with a lower budget. And when we started seeing good results, we started increasing that so we could get a larger pool. And then we'd create these campaigns. So we're only targeting people that you know, saw this specific video, we've combined some of them. But again, because we service a lot of different ICPs. We also have a big difference, like virtual events very different instant in person. So we could show specific mobile like event ads to people that maybe saw one of our like event cut downs that we're talking about how to get the most out of your event app, just like specific things like that. I mean, you can do, it's pretty easy to set that stuff up in your audiences. And then when you're creating your campaign, just selecting those remarketing audiences. AJ Wilcox So obviously, we can put together video programs. And if you can't actually tell something's working, it can be hard to convince, you know, upper leadership to give you more budget or hang on a little bit longer. What was the effect that you actually saw on your lead gen programs as this video strategy went on? Andrew Harder It changed a lot and for several reasons. One, we were starting to invest more in video and less in our lead gen. Because we started like I mentioned this earlier, but what I was able to get as a test budget for this was 20% of our paid social budget, which was a decent size. It was plenty for us to get going but that started to creep up to like 30% and like four already percent after a few months. And so we were seeing a drop in our leads, but because of our increased efforts in like targeting more refined audiences, and I would also say like, I don't have data to prove this necessarily, but I think, you know, running this alongside all of the video ads that we were doing that we're not like super pushy, or even, like, just kind of generic B2B stuff that no one really cares about, like it was educational. And like, you could take stuff away from that, we saw huge drops in our CPL, like we saw, like over a 60% drop in our CPL. But the other thing was, we had a budget reduction, like, you know, a lot of SaaS companies, we're starting to see throughout 2022, so we had more of that hit. But what I did was I measured this, after the first three months of doing this, I measured that against the spring when we had a much larger budget. And we were doing just pretty much all lead gen. And we had 28% fewer leads, but we had a 63% drop in our cpl. So it was like a massive, like we should have had really way less leads. But we were seeing the audience targeting I think even just like the quality, and there's a lot of things that go into this. So I know I'm oversimplifying a bit, because we were testing a few different offers. It wasn't apples to apples, but overall, like for paid social for LinkedIn, our budget was like 70%, less from like this comparison period. But to answer your question, we were still running a lot of the same type of lead gen, but we don't do any hard direct response, like demo request. But even so we saw saw a huge lift and the opportunities that we were producing both from like, kind of a first touch triggering standpoint, but also just like influencing, we can see these metrics because our serums integrated with metadata, kind of like, you know, the headline numbers was like, we spent like 70% last, but we had like 60% more pipeline that our sales team had generated. So again, like a lot of stuff goes into this. But I mean, that was like a pretty astounding difference, especially with the budget difference. And also 70%, less budget, but also like we were spending roughly half of that at this point on video. So like we were spending significantly less on lead gen. So it's a combination of a lot of things like we changed our audience targeting, we had all that video creative, we were running. Yes. And you could also say, well, all that stuff, you're doing the springton that influenced the fall? Yes, of course, it totally did. So it's not like a clear cut, you know, like AB comparison. But it was such a stark difference. We really had a stark stop, like in September when we started this, like, Okay, we're gonna really change our strategy. And we started like increasing that investment. So for anyone that says, like, oh, you can't get demos looked at our quality from LinkedIn, you definitely can like there's different ways to do it. I know there's some brands still do run some of that direct response or conversation ads, and that does drive pipeline. But like for us, like we try that it doesn't work at all. I mean, I see this all the time. I go into our CRM, I see our HubSpot reports, and I see, oh, we've had some more paid social meetings booked. And I'm like, oh, is that from this month? Did they come through this month? And a lot of times, it's no, they actually like downloaded one of our guides maybe like three or four months ago. And then they came back through search or like email alerts or different things like that. And now like they're either ready to buy, or like they weren't in market at all. And now they are and like we've been top of mind for them. We've been educating them, not like harassing them to like book a demo. And they came to us. And I think I've heard this before. And I love this way of like measuring is it working? Like you can tell if your marketing is working, if more people are like coming to your sales team to ask to talk versus how much are you going out and like asking them? I just love kind of like that idea and way to quantify it. So yeah, the very long winded answer to your question, but but certainly has changed. AJ Wilcox And I think marketers, myself included in this, we feel like once we've warmed a top of funnel well enough that eventually you've earned the right to ask for a demo. And in this case, you're seeing demos come in naturally, like you're not even having to ask for them. But even if you do run demo ads, you still don't feel like you're getting a great response from them. It's almost like people are perceiving us as being too pushy when we're asking but if we leave them alone, they'll naturally do it. Andrew Harder Yeah, absolutely. And I would even say to like one way how I justified testing 20% of our budget for video was I crunched the numbers on Okay, of all these leads, like yeah, you can show low CPMs especially on LinkedIn. Like it's good because a lot of times you call them like ICP leads depending on like title or company but what I did was actually measure that down to the full funnel different getting through the sales cycles and like close one and I'm not a huge fan of just focusing on like first touch like okay, did this trigger from like, I love looking at influence metrics and things like that, because obviously there's so many different touch points. And there's some great marketing tech out there now that can help with this, but it was like a no brainer to be like oh yeah, you can test 20% because like it's not like we were producing millions of dollars in revenue from this. It's like Okay, we have some great content to produce also, like kind of an added bonus. And this is kind of a caveat leftfield thing. If you're running virtual events or in person events, and you have that footage, you have to, like, repurpose that and run that on LinkedIn especially. And I would say, don't just do an organic channel so that all your employees and your family like it, put some paid budget behind it, target the audience that you know, is your target persona. And use that content, like you're gonna get much more out of that. And also, it's like a win win for like the content team, the events team or whoever is doing this. Or if you're a solo marketer, or a small team, like you can just get so much more out of that. So I would say even from just a, I don't know, like marketing team ROI standpoint, like it just makes a ton of sense. AJ Wilcox Alright, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive back into the interview with Andrew Harder. The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. AJ Wilcox If you're a B2B company and care about getting more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, then chances are LinkedIn ads are for you. But the platform isn't easy to use and can be painfully expensive on the front end. At B2linked, we've cracked the code to maximizing your ROI while minimizing platform costs. Our methodology includes building and executing LinkedIn Ad strategies that are customized to your unique needs, and tailored to the way that your B2B consumers buy today. Over the last 12 years, we've worked with some of LinkedIn's largest advertisers in the world, we've spent over $150 million on the platform, and we're official LinkedIn partners. If you want to generate more sales opportunities from your ideal prospects, book a discovery call at B2Linked.com/apply. And we'd absolutely love the chance to get to work with you. AJ Wilcox All right, let's jump back into the interview. I want to dive in a little bit deeper on video because we talked about the customer research, and anyone can do that. But now as we start veering over into video, now, the production value is getting a little bit higher. And you actually have to start dedicating some budget unless you happen to be a videographer by trade and can throw things together. How did you attack video specifically? How did you deal with the overhead of the cost of video? Also, how did you decide what types of videos to film and actors or employees or customers? How did that all line up? Andrew Harder Yeah, so I mean, this answer might be a bit strange, but I think it might give some people some more confidence to test this, like we Krystal and I, like knew the type of strategy we wanted to test. And we didn't have net new budget or things to do, or money to play with to create that new stuff. So we went and looked at okay, what do we have? And you also might be thinking, well, he works for any event company, like they have event software, they are like doing these things. Yes, huge advantage. I will say that for sure, but a lot of marketing teams still have some, you know, own first party events. And to kind of speak to one thing you were saying like, I would actually say you don't need super high production, I would actually advocate it's better to have more just authentic real video, especially on LinkedIn, because you know, you're seeing your network and then all of a sudden, you see like this really stocky photo, video type stuff doesn't really kind of penetrate your mind, you don't really care about that. So I would say like, you don't necessarily need the super high budget, you don't to go out and like, you know, spend 100 grand on some agency. We do have like a freelancer they used to help with, like some of these cut downs, but there's a lot of freelancers out there, they're gonna like break your marketing budget. I mean, Krystal stepped up big time, she spent a lot of time cutting down these videos, so huge props to her for I mean, she's a paid media marketer, just like myself, but she was like, well, I can like cut down some of this stuff. And over time, like when we started doing this more, our team started seeing like how much of an impact this was having our events team and content team are getting more proactive and like, oh, we're gonna plan this event that's upcoming, we know that the paid team is going to use this giving us timestamps, and in that to our freelancers, but to say more concisely, like, you don't need a ton of budget for an agency. Yes, we use our event software, but you don't need that, like you can use something which should say WebEx first or zoom. Like you can use something like that, and record that. That's just fine. I mean, you can see you can look at the engagement metrics and I would actually say if you already have some video that's super high production value or something like compare that against something that's more just raw. And I would even say to there are some larger brands out there SaaS brands that do this and I think it works well. Caveat to is if you do work for a large brand, like there are brand standards and I get that because I worked for Cisco so like there are certain things we have to abide by, but like at the end of the day, you can definitely do this. I would say it's not as easy as what I made it sound like for the customer interviews like that's super easy. Like it is a different thing, but I think anyone can do that. AJ Wilcox And how did you plan what type of video content you'd show? At what stage in the buyers journey? Andrew Harder Yeah, great question, I think also super important thing that we learned as we went on, because we really started with just kind of more. I don't like the term thought leadership, because I think it's more than that, how we were kind of framing it was like, Is this educational? Like if I wasn't, and we would even ask, like our events team, like, would you interact with this? And a lot of times, it was them saying, so it's like, yeah, of course they would. But like, the questions I would kind of ask myself is like, is this going to help someone that's running events do their job? Is this differentiated enough from just kind of like the generic advice out there, and all the events we're doing, like, very well thought out, and so we do have the benefit of that. So like, that's where we started off with was like that content that's really going to hit a pain point, or just give some value. But then from there, we'd get a bit deeper, like I was saying earlier, you're talking about hybrid events, like the value of that go a bit deeper and say specifically, like, you really need to hone in on like event sponsorships, or you really need to make sure you have the right event technology. And like you could say, well, that's kind of like a hard sell, we actually have a lot of content from our team that's saying, like, you need something and then like, oh, yeah, of course, like, we can provide you with that technology. But it's kind of educating to like, there's, this is specific to the event industry. But like, there's been so many changes, as you can imagine, with like COVID coming up on like, three years, and like it went in and out from in person to virtual. But now like, there's just a huge range, and like what hybrid even means. And so we would take people on these journeys, if anyone is familiar with like YouTube sequence ads, it's kind of similar, like, you can just set this up to then go a bit deeper into that. And then really, the best kind of journeys we had was, okay, we have like this educational video to show, then we have another layer of that, speaking to something more specific, maybe we had one or two of those, and then layer in like a more specific like this, how our product can do that. And so it's a bit easier to explain when I have like a spreadsheet to show, but hopefully that helps the audience a little bit. AJ Wilcox Very much. So let's say smaller marketing teams that don't have a budget for maybe something like metadata. Maybe they're working with a basic CRM, what's some advice that you'd give them on ensuring that they could take cold prospects, educate them through video, and actually ended up with close deals? Andrew Harder That is a great question. I hope I can give a great enough answer to that because I think there's so many factors that do come into this, because I would say we had a lot of things going for us with the video content we already had to play with. And then we were able to expand that. But if you are a smaller team, you don't have as much budget for tech or video, things like that. This is kind of obvious advice. But just like start small, even before that I would challenge like, look at what you're doing right now. And really challenge yourself and ask yourself the questions like if I am my, like target audience, if I am this, you know, X persona, do I actually care about this? Like, is this giving some value? Or am I just noise in this person's LinkedIn feed? I think you'll find a lot of your stuff is either stale, or it's really just kind of about you the company versus like, how can you first like give value and not ask for anything in return. But then from there, like if you have products that are fairly easy to record, like some tutorials to like, you might have a subject matter expert on your team. So that I would say that's kind of a hard gap to fill. But you can use free tools out there to just record either yourself or someone on your team, walking through the benefits of what you get from XYZ, like whatever your product is, or service is. And so yeah, I feel like I didn't meet my expectations for answering that question. But hopefully, I would like to starting with, like really challenging, like what's working. And then if you have content, like reuse that content, and you can go from there and get learnings and segment your audience so you can see who's engaging with what. AJ Wilcox I love it. Yeah, I think that's perfectly fine. Great answer. Well, the one question I like to ask everyone I interview, what are you both personally and professionally most excited about coming up? Either in 2023 or in the following months? Andrew Harder Yeah, love that question. I'll start professionally. I think I'm excited. So we are really early days and testing out a true like plg like free motion. It's new for us because we've been very like enterprise software. Like you can't really use the product without talking to us. I'm really excited for us to test that just from a marketing standpoint. But also how it's gonna play into our paid campaigns, especially like with LinkedIn, too. I see so much opportunity and I follow some other brands that do this so well and really just showing people like how easy it is to get started. I think you can apply this to anything in life. Everyone wants to like, you know, be in better shape or read more books or do things like that, but it's like just getting started. That's the hardest and I think cuz there's so much potential for us. There's not too many competitors that we have. There's a lot that have like that motion, but their software isn't as powerful. And I think just being able to learn as a marketer how to do that it's gonna be really fun. And I think getting more into being a quote unquote, content creator on LinkedIn, I'm very inconsistent still, but it's been fun just to put myself out there more. I mean, it's really how it's opened up opportunities like this to speak with you. And I think I'm just looking forward to meeting more marketers that I can learn from share some of my experiences, beginning of this, like I didn't set out to have a career in marketing, I didn't even know what PPC was. And I think it's really, really fun to speak to younger marketers. And so I'm, I'm hoping for more opportunities like that. And then personally, I have two young kids, my daughter is about to be three next month, which is crazy. And my son is just over eight months. So last year, couldn't do a whole lot because had a young baby. And so I'm excited for we have some fun trips planned. So I'm originally from Minnesota. I have a cousin getting married so getting out there and seeing some family. My younger sister's getting married this summer as well. So excited for that. And for my kids to hopefully have some memorable flower girl type moments, you know, that'll be super fun. And we have some friends in Wisconsin that we go up to see, looking forward to that. My wife and I love to travel and just with young kids don't get to do it as much. And this year, we have more plans. So excited for that. And yeah, especially on a day like today when it's like I don't know, like it was in the teens this morning maybe it's in the 20s now, but so cold, and I'm already looking forward to summer. So yeah, that's kind of what's on my mind. AJ Wilcox Awesome. Well, you're doing a great job of creating content on LinkedIn, for sure. I'm going to put down on the show notes. I want to invite everyone to come follow Andrew there on his LinkedIn profile. Also, I don't know if you have a minute if you can share with us. Maybe some insight into the posts that really caught my attention you posted, it was kind of like a mini case study about using video ads on LinkedIn. Can you tell us like was that he most popular thing you've posted on LinkedIn? What sort of engagement did you get from that? Does that inspire you to do more? Andrew Harder Yeah, so it was actually the second most because the first most was also another kind of LinkedIn case study is about document ads. I don't know if I was one of the first first but I was early into testing that. And it really if for all the people that love the gated versus on gated conversations, like we really put that to the test. The ungraded document did fantastic for us. And like that got a ton of engagement. Like I said, I'm still early. So I'm trying to kind of find what stuff I want to talk about, hoping to talk more about personal stuff, too. But yeah, it did get a ton of engagement. I mean, I was thrilled when I shared it with you. And you said you shared it with your team. I was like, okay, that's why I know it's good, then if Aj is sharing that. So yeah. And I honestly, like that's probably an easier thing to go to that post. And it really breaks down the process that we did, and some of the results that I shared today. But it really makes it pretty simple. I think a lot of times, it's easy to get just like oh man, I can't revolutionize my strategy or something, you know, just sounds so big when you break it down into like these bite size steps. So I think that's maybe why it got so much engagement. Of course, yeah, the results do catch people's eye, but a lot of marketers found it helpful. So yeah, definitely connect with me. I'm only active on LinkedIn. I'm not really a social media person, ironically, being that I advertise on it. But yeah, please connect with me on LinkedIn. I appreciate you sharing that AJ. 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. AJ Wilcox All right, like we mentioned during the interview, I've got some great resources for you. First of all, you'll see in the show notes below Andrew Harder's link to his LinkedIn profile, go follow him or even connect with him. You'll also see what we mentioned the post that he posted about his LinkedIn video ads strategy. And that one got a ton of attention, which is so cool. It's actually the reason why he's here on the show. He also had another viral post about LinkedIn document ads that actually went more than double the amount of virality is that one so definitely check that one out. Both links are in the show notes. If you or anyone you know is looking for a course on LinkedIn Ads, check out the one that I did on LinkedIn Learning. You'll see the link in the show notes. But it is by far the most succinct, the highest quality, and the lowest cost of any LinkedIn Ads course out there. Also, if this is your first episode you've listened to make sure to hit the subscribe button. But if this is not the first time you're listening, please do go and leave us a review. It is a terrific zero cost way of supporting the podcast and I would be eternally grateful to you with Any questions, suggestions or corrections, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. And I'm cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Ep 43 about Gen Z Market Research on LinkedIn Sarah Weise LinkedIn Ep 65 about Microsegmentation Sarah Weise's LinkedIn Learning Course on Market Research Certified Marketing Experts Certification Follow AJ on LinkedIn NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Youtube Channel Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript LinkedIn Ads is a market research tool. Yeah, you know it. We're talking about market research 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! For a long time, I've treated LinkedIn Ads as much of a market research tool, as an ad platform. You've probably gotten a little bit of a taste of this, if you've been listening for a while. Especially episodes like 65, where we talked about micro segmentation. So if you haven't listened to that episode, definitely go back and add it to your queue. But today, I wanted to cover market research and let you into these additional uses of LinkedIn's fantastic ad platform. Of course, all of this is made possible by LinkedIn's incredible targeting. 0:53 First in the news, LinkedIn first cohort of certified marketing experts just graduated this week. During episode 76, n the news section, I announced the opening of LinkedIn's Certified Marketing Experts Program. And it's basically an ad certification exam that you can take to show your prowess on LinkedIn Ads. It's actually really complex. It has four levels, and it's its own learning management system all baked in with tons of different lessons. If you haven't checked it out yet, first you become a certified marketer, then you fulfill some requirements to become a certified insider, then you can rise up to being a certified expert in training. And then once you've met the requirements there, you can graduate to a LinkedIn certified marketing expert. All of these levels, you can then add to your LinkedIn profile as a certification, which is really cool. I was lucky enough to be selected for their first cohort. So LinkedIn flew six of us out to their offices in New York City, inside the Empire State Building, for a few days. And as of recording, I just got back in yesterday, I have to say it was awesome to get to hang out with the other six graduates in New York, we had great food, great collaboration opportunities, and learning together, I'll be posting a synopsis of the event and some of my learnings and takeaways, and they're probably already out by the time you're hearing this. But if you want those details, make sure you're following me on LinkedIn and go find that post. You'll also find a link in the show notes to that certified marketing program. So if you haven't already, I'd highly recommend you go and get signed up and get certified. Seriously, if you're hardcore enough to listen to a podcast all about LinkedIn ads, you really deserve the credentials to prove your geekiness. Okay, I'll get off that pedestal. The next news item really got me excited and then let me down on January 24 of 2023. LinkedIn rolled out the ability to break down performance by device type. We were so excited when we noticed it. And we posted about it. The way it worked is within campaign manager, you go to break down, and then in that drop down, you'll see either impression, device type, or conversion device type. And then it would break out your actual ad performance by desktop web, mobile app, and mobile web. Well, we posted about it got excited about it started playing with it. And then within hours, it was gone completely. Not sure what happened. But while we had it, we did notice some discrepancies. If you go under impression device type, it displays all metrics broken down by device type. Where if you go into conversion device type, it only displays conversion metrics. But the conversion metrics between the two are a bit off. So maybe it was a rollout that LinkedIn didn't intend to roll out yet. Maybe someone accidentally hit the button. I don't know. But we're highly anticipating its return. And I know I am reaching a bit on this, but it feels to me like exposing the metrics around devices and how they're interacting is the first step to allowing us to target by device, which is a feature I've been pleading for since 2013. All right, let's jump into the market research topic on hand. Let's hit it. 4:02 First, I think it helps to define what market research is. The definition I got when I just binged it. That's a thing, right? Binging it? Anyway, is that the action or activity of gathering information about consumers needs and preferences. And if you listened at all to Episode 43, where I had Sarah Weise on the program. She is a market researcher. This is what she does for a living. So in that episode, we did talk a little bit about market research. But that episode was mostly about a survey we did about how Gen Z uses LinkedIn. But we went ahead and linked to her LinkedIn profile as well as that episode in the show notes. So feel free to go check that one out to get caught up. Okay, so market research is all about gathering information about needs and preferences from your consumers. So why in the world am I talking about doing this on an ad platform? Well, my reasoning is very simple. The targeting is so good. It allows you to create like little focus groups. And then based on the behaviors that we see, and even the differences between groups behaviors, that tells us what someone is willing to engage with, or maybe what they're not willing to engage with. For instance, if you look at click through rates, they'll really tell us who's interested. And if you are offering some sort of a conversion, the conversion rate will tell us how intensely interested they are enough to actually convert. Years and years ago, I remember reading the book, The Four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. And although I'm not a huge proponent of the methodology found in that book, one of the things he mentioned that I really liked was he used Google Ads back then to test different titles for his book. So what he would do is hit put both titles that he was considering into an ad, and run those ads, and then see which one got more conversions. I think he ran them to something like a landing page that said, click here to be notified when this book becomes available or something like that. I remember thinking that was a little bit misleading, a little bit skeezy. But the concept really carried with me. And I realized early on that because LinkedIn is targeting allowed us to target by very specific elements of who someone is, as a professional, we could do testing much in the same way. And actually even better if you ask me, so much of the communication I've had with market researchers, has been them trying to find people who fit a certain criteria, they have a certain level of experience in business, or have a certain seniority, or in a certain company size. And all of these are things that just by the virtue of LinkedIn targeting, we can already do very, very easily. One of the ways that I'll use this is within a single campaign. So we're targeting the same person, I will AB test ads to test different ideas, or even different motivations. So for instance, one of my ads might be fear inducing, like I'm trying to communicate, if you're not paying attention to this concept, you're gonna be behind in your career, and you'll get fired and passed over for promotions, that kind of feeling. And then the other ad might make them feel like more of a hero. Because you're doing this, you're ahead of the curve, you're gonna be lauded as a hero within the company. And what I've done there is just figured out to a certain type of professional, which concept is actually more engaging to them. So that's really cool. You can also really do the same thing that Tim Ferriss did, where you have two ads, each going to a different offer that doesn't exist, and then have a conversion action to sign up for early access or expressing interest. Another way you could do this is by AB testing audiences. So let's say you have the same two ads, you put those into two different campaigns that are identical except for one difference, what you're looking for is to see a lift in one of those audiences, Episode 65, all about micro segmenting. This is all about that, you have the same targeting, except you can break out campaigns by something. One of the ones I really like to break out by is by level of seniority. So all the other targeting stays the same. But maybe one campaign is targeting managers as a level of seniority. And then another one is targeting just directors, another one just VPs and another one just C level. And then we get to compare performance differences between the different levels of seniority. You'll get to find out something like does my content speak to executives, or low level management, or even individual contributors. Based on the engagement of each seniority, you could consider creating new offers just for them. And again, click through rate, it's going to tell you your level of engagement. CPCs, or CPMs, could tell you what it costs to get in front of a specific segment. And then conversion rates can tell you how invested someone is in actually taking the next step. And I know it's crazy, I think you just assume that if you're going after someone who's in the C suite, it's going to cost more to reach them than someone who's a manager or someone who's an individual contributor. But that's not the case. So many times we've done this test. By being able to speak relevantly to a C level audience, you get click through rates high enough that it actually costs less to reach them than it does to reach someone of a lower seniority, which is obviously already a cool learning in and of itself. Your boss is probably going to be really excited when you tell him or her that it's actually cheaper to reach a CMO or a CIO or a CTO than it is to reach a manager of IT. Obviously creating new segments new audiences can be a lot to manage within an account. So if you don't want to actually do this through micro segmenting and breaking out different campaigns. You can also do a little bit of this through the demographics tab. If you're on the demographics tab, you can break down your ad performance by company size, by industry, by seniority, and quite a few other things. With company size you can find out do larger companies interact with my content better, or smaller companies, or enterprises. Industry is obviously pretty self explanitory. Seniorities, we already talked about. You can also break out performance by location, but one thing I've learned is that when you're breaking down by location, be aware that earlier time zones in the day will be over represented in your data, if you are hitting your daily budgets. What I mean by that is, if I was just targeting North America, for instance, if I have a combined daily budget of like $50, it's totally possible I could spend that entire $50, just on the East Coast, like New York and Toronto are getting into the office that day and turning on their computers and booting up. But if you're not actively hitting your daily budgets during the day, then location will be a lot more accurate. You can break down by job function. So like, does someone in accounting, care more about what you're advertising than someone in finance. You can also break down by job title, but I will say that it's a little bit less helpful for market research, just because it's so granular. But if your targeting is really on point really tight, then maybe job title will be a lot more helpful. All right, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into how to use LinkedIn Ads to find out which keywords are most engaging. The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. 11:17 If you're a B2B company and care about getting more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, then chances are LinkedIn Ads are for you. But the platform isn't easy to use, and can be painfully expensive on the front end. At B2Llinked, we've cracked the code to maximizing ROI while minimizing costs. Our methodology includes building and executing LinkedIn Ad strategies, always customized to your unique needs, and tailored to the way that B2B consumers buy today. Over the last 11 years, we've worked with some of LinkedIn largest advertisers in the world, we've spent over $150 million on the platform, and we're official LinkedIn partners. If you want to generate more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, book a discovery call at B2Linked.com/apply. We'd absolutely love the opportunity to get to work with you. 12:07 Alright, let's jump into how we use LinkedIn Ads to test different keywords. So you may have the same ad copy, the same offer, but you might be curious if one keyword peaks someone's attention more than an another one. As a recent example of ads I was launching, it was for a client who has software where a machine learning model does a lot of the work. So what I did is I launched ads, the same version, but one of them talked about AI like artificial intelligence, and another use the words machine learning. And if everything else is the same, all except for that word, it gives us a lot of certainty that using the word that got the highest click through rate, maybe it's most topically interesting. Wth the rise of chat GPT, and DALL-E, the image generating service through AI, the word AI has gotten a lot of headlines recently. So I won't be surprised if this test shows that AI is more interesting than machine learning. Just as another example, if you were targeting marketers, you could try having the word marketer and the word marketeer. And everyone's got an opinion about the word marketeer. So I'm not pushing it by any means. But it is another example of some sort of a keyword test that you can do from within your ads. 13:19 Now, if anyone's listening who actually does do market research, I'm sure you are putting your glasses up closer to the your face and saying what you're talking about AJ is not actually market research. And that's correct. It's more a lot of audience testing. But you can actually use LinkedIn Ads to do actual market research. For instance, the offer in your ad could be a survey to get responses, or to elicit participation from specific audience segments. Market researchers are usually given specific constraints around what they need. So if they have 300 participants, but they need 350, it's not crazy to think that you could go on to an ad platform and pay a little bit more participant just to fill up the study. So for instance, if a market researcher needs more surveys from people in a certain corporate environment, they might pay $50 to $100 per participant, but it might still be worthwhile. Something we've seen to be successful is offering gift cards in exchange for a participation in a survey. And that tends to work well on LinkedIn Ads. So then that leaves us with what do you actually do with the data you collect while you're doing this market research? I think the obvious answer is to make hay while the sun shines. When you find anything that's performing better, optimize towards that top performing ad copy, or those offers, or those audience segments. You may be really surprised if one segment of your population really becomes your core audience that the whole company's marketing team turns to focus on. And you can find this because LinkedIns amazing targeting is helping you do it. If a certain segment is performing well. You can go and raise budgets on those top performing segments. You can increase bids to try to get more of that traffic. You can go and write more ad copy like your top performing copy. You can go and create more offers like your top performing offers. And of course, all along the way, if there's a segment that isn't delivering, you can pause it, you can bid it down, shut it off. This really is the magic of being able to micro segment your audiences because really anything that we want more of, we can turn those dials up in a way that we couldn't if they were just combined into one larger campaign. Being able to raise budgets and raise bids on those super high performers, and turning the dials down lowering bids lowering budgets on the segment's who aren't performing. If these were combined into one campaign, you have no levers that you can pull to get more of what you want. You can also craft new offers for that high performing segment. If you know one segment is performing better than anything, go out and start creating specific content for them. They're obviously hungry for what it is you're offering. Alright, 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. 16:18 All right, all of this is going to be in the show notes below, but Episode 43, we've got the link to that. It was the one all about market research around Gen Z on LinkedIn with Sarah Weise. I've also linked to Sarah Weise's LinkedIn profile. Episode 65, was all about micro segmentation so we've linked to that as well. You'll also see a link to Sarah Weise's LinkedIn Learning course, all about Market Research Foundation. If this has been interesting to you talking about market research, you'll definitely want to go to the source and learn deeper about what's involved. I linked to the certified marketing expert certification down there as well make sure you go and get signed up and participate. If you or anyone you know is looking to learn more about LinkedIn Ads, check out the course that I did with LinkedIn Learning all about LinkedIn Ads. The course is an hour and a half long, it's relatively simple, and it covers a lot of the topics we talked about here on the podcast. It is by far the best course I've seen on LinkedIn Ads, especially given its cost, it's extremely affordable. If this is your first time listening, welcome! So excited to have you on board, make sure to hit that subscribe button so you'll get to hear all of our future episodes. And if this is not your first time listening, please do go and review us. We spend about six hours per week creating these podcast episodes. And we do it out of the kindness of our hearts. The best way that you can say thank you if you're enjoying these is to go and leave us a review, usually on Apple podcasts. But if you find anywhere else that you can leave a review we'd love that too. And of course, we'll give you a shout out to thank you. With any questions, suggestions or corrections about the podcast, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Youtube Channel Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript AJ Wilcox Have you thoroughly tested the LinkedIn Audience Network yet? Some big changes have been made to it recently. And there's a lot to appreciate. Today on the LinkedIn Ads Show, we're diving into the LinkedIn Audience Network. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. AJ Wilcox Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. If you're like me, you've seen the option for enabling LinkedIn Audience Network and sponsored content campaigns for years. Maybe it's something that you've occasionally used, or in some cases, maybe you've always excluded it. Well, LinkedIn recently made big changes to the audience network. And I wanted to bring LinkedIn's product team in to come and talk to us about it. Now we as marketers, we seem to always be shortening things to acronyms. I've called the LinkedIn Audience Network LAN for lots of years. And in this episode, we mostly refer to it by its full name, but don't be confused. It's the same option that I've talked about in the past. Now, Peter Turner was one of the product people at LinkedIn for lots of years. And I've gotten to interface with him for a long time, as he's worked on many different projects. And as I wanted to have an episode all about the LinkedIn Audience Network, of course, I knew he was all over it. And I wanted to make sure we brought him on. And he introduced me to Lipika Gimmler, who's also over it. And so we're trying to kind of dual interview approach. So I hope you like hearing from both Peter and Lipika. AJ Wilcox I wanted to give a shout out to Rob Baijens from the Netherlands. And Rob I'm sorry if I butchered your last name. But he left a review on the podcast and he said, "100% the LinkedIn go to podcast five stars love AJs podcast, he gives so much insights, updates, and inspiration when it comes to LinkedIn advertising and more. What I especially like is not only his guru level expertise, although he is a LinkedIn guru, but the AJ also tells the audience when he simply doesn't know yet asking the audience to share their thoughts. This makes his podcast 100% authentic. I want to apologize to AJ for not taking the time until now to give him the five star review he deserves", with a little smiley face. "AJ, please keep up the good work as you bring so much value to the LinkedIn community. All the best Rob Baijens, the Netherlands." Rob, I don't care how long you waited. I'm so grateful that you left this review. I do try really hard to be truthful when there is something I just don't know or don't have enough data on. So I'm glad you picked up on that. I do have an ego. I don't like to admit when I don't know something, but I try really hard for you guys. Thanks so much for heeding the call when I asked for reviews. So thank you. And of course everyone else, please do follow Rob's lead here and go and leave a review as well. As a reminder, make sure you go back and listen to episode 83. It was the holiday ad Performance Report. We've had about 35 man hours go into producing that episode and the report. If you skip that episode, do go back and listen to it. Okay, without further ado, let's go ahead and jump into the interview. AJ Wilcox All right, Lipika and Peter, I'm so excited to have you guys here. Lipika, let's start with you. Tell us about yourself and what you do at LinkedIn. Lipika Gimmler Hey, AJ, my name is Lipika. And I'm a product marketing manager at LinkedIn. And I work on the LinkedIn Audience Network. And I typically sit at the intersection of our product build and our go to market teams, really helping in the formulation of product value propositions as well as partnering with our product teams in continuing to build meaningful solutions for our customers. AJ Wilcox Fantastic. And, Peter, same question to you. Peter Turner Hey AJ, great to be here. I've been at LinkedIn for a little over six years now. I've had a variety of roles focused on different partnership programs. Throughout this time, one of those programs has been the LinkedIn Audience Network. And I've been a part of the growth of LinkedIn Audience Network from its founding. And now my team looks after the partnerships and ecosystem strategy necessary to keep growing the value we create for marketers. AJ Wilcox That's awesome, Peter, as long as I can remember you and I've been talking about the LinkedIn Audience Network. The impetus for this whole interview was I haven't had an episode about the LinkedIn Audience Network. And I've always been telling myself as soon as I can have Peter on that's when we're going to have an episode. So this is the culmination of that. Really excited to have both you and Lipika here. Well, I think we need to start out with just a general definition here. What is the LinkedIn Audience Network? I'd love for you to tell us even more about how it works, what it's used for? How we see it within campaign manager. Lipika Gimmler Yeah, absolutely. So in a nutshell, the way we describe the LinkedIn Audience Network is that it's a placement available within LinkedIn suite of advertising products. So it essentially enables our advertisers to reach their targeted professional audiences at scale across a network of vetted publishers really to maximize their advertising outcomes. So by leveraging the LinkedIn Audience Network, what advertisers can do is number one, they can extend the reach of their sponsored content campaigns, to LinkedIn professionals who happen to be active on trusted third party apps and sites and advertisers are also able to boost campaign performance across full funnel objectives. So by leveraging the LinkedIn Audience Network, they can achieve better return on adspend and improve their marketing outcomes by really activating their campaigns across both the LinkedIn feed and the LinkedIn Audience Network. So it really is a powerful, powerful tool that should be considered by advertisers who want to really expand the scale of their B2B campaigns. AJ Wilcox And I love the audience network for the exact reason. When we're just advertising on LinkedIn, it almost feels like we're bidding on someone and we're waiting for them to come back to LinkedIn. But through the LinkedIn Audience Network, we're able to reach those exact right professionals, with the right targeting pretty much all the way across the web. So I'm a big fan. Lipika Gimmler Yep, absolutely. And that's exactly what the product was designed to do is to really work in partnership with a LinkedIn feed to help our advertisers ultimately reach their intended audiences across the touchpoints that matter whether that's on the platform, or whether that's off the platform. So it really is a fantastic tool to consider experimenting with. AJ Wilcox Perfect. And Peter, tell us about how LinkedIn decided who would be a great publisher to partner with on the audience now? Peter Turner Well, first, we couldn't have an audience network without publishers. And so we're deeply grateful for our publishers and the role they play. Our publisher partners strategy is one that is deeply rooted in our principles provide value to our B2B marketers. And we do this by extending campaign scale and reach while helping ensure that their brand messages appear in safe environments. We look at both quantitative data like the relative level of invalid traffic on a publisher as well as more qualitative reviews of their ad experience and ad load. We prioritize publishers that we know to be spaces where our professional audiences are present and engaged, and we have checks and balances in place to bid on quality inventory. Because brand safety is incredibly important to our advertisers and to us, we work with leading partners like DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science, and Pixelate to help protect marketer campaigns. AJ Wilcox And what I love about this is it seems like every ad platform who has an audience network, the general feel is it's going to be a lower quality network. But I've never felt that with LinkedIn, it always feels like there's premium placements. And I would imagine that you're probably to thank for that. Peter Turner Just like with LinkedIn, we take brand safety very seriously and want to make sure that marketers can trust coming off LinkedIn as much as they trust running from their campaigns on LinkedIn. AJ Wilcox Most of us know that the various display networks out there for digital marketers are commonly regarded as being low quality. So how is the LinkedIn Audience Network different from the Google Display Network? And Facebook's Audience Network? Lipika Gimmler Yeah, that's a great question. And to really summarize it succinctly, the LinkedIn Audience Network is truly designed and built differently from other audience networks, as it's ultimately rooted in enabling our advertisers to reach highly coveted professional audiences and engage b2b decision makers across the touchpoints that matter, and do so at scale. So we consider our audience network to actually be a core part of our ad placement offering. So it's considered to be a truly vetted product from both a performance standpoint and from a brand safety standpoint, as Peter alluded to, so advertisers who are looking for ways to further scale their campaign and engage with their target professional audience across the surfaces that matter, find a lot of value in leveraging our audience network, as we've had studies show that marketers can achieve up to nine times more monthly touch points to reaching LinkedIn members who tend to be more active on our audience network. This is definitely something that really does set us apart from other audience networks. And we've also invested a lot in making sure that we reach and target the right audience through integrations to third party supply sources, and bolstering our audience graph. And of course, doing so safely with leading brand safety and suitability solutions through the partners that Peter mentioned as well. DoubleVerify being one of the most recent partnerships that we've forged in the past quarter, Peter Turner AJ, we found that advertisers achieve better return on adspend improve marketing outcomes by by asking their campaigns both on LinkedIn on instant work, and alongside the LinkedIn feed. Advertisers see an estimated cost per 1000 impressions reduced by 47%. And 63%, lower cost per conversions when leveraging the Audience Network. AJ Wilcox And that makes perfect sense to me. This is the right people seeing your message more often. in more places. I like to use this thought idea of like, what makes you cool in high school? Is it one friend who tells 1000 people that you're cool, or is it 1000 different people saying that you're cool. We know what drives popularity, and its multiple sources. I really see that as being one of the the big ways that the LinkedIn Audience Network helps our campaigns. Peter Turner We help LinkedIn marketers be cool. I like that. AJ Wilcox Yeah, exactly. So speaking of cool, what are some of the ways that marketers are using the LinkedIn Audience Network? If you want to share any like cool case studies or what people are doing? That has been really exciting? Lipika Gimmler Yeah, absolutely. So we've actually seen some remarkable case studies of customers leveraging LinkedIn Audience Network for very various use cases such as brand awareness being one that comes top of mind. So an example is a leading technology company that works with LinkedIn primarily because of our zero party and our first party data. So just double clicking into what those terms mean specifically. So zero party data is anything that our members willingly provide us via their LinkedIn profile information. So this is publicly available information that they have on their LinkedIn profile and updated continuously. Whereas first party data is what we can then derive from user behavior on the platform. So an example of this would be engagement data. So this customer in question that leveraged LinkedIn Audience Network for brand awareness, actually leveraged it for a very specific use case, which was Account Based Marketing. So they leveraged our audience network to really reach hard to find strategic members of the buying committee, and were ultimately able to see a 58% decline in CPM or cost per 1000 impressions, and saw 151% increase in their ability to reach CXOs, which was a core audience segment that they were looking to target. Similarly, we've also seen advertisers leverage the LinkedIn Audience Network for consideration campaigns. So here, an example that comes to mind is a client who leveraged the LinkedIn Audience Network to lower cost per clicks by about 65%. And saw an uptick in click through rates by about 90%. And we have another client who saw 2.2 times higher video view through rate, and 2.5 times higher video completion rate and 64%, lower cost per view. So as you can tell from a lot of these examples, the LinkedIn Audience Network is really great for full funnel objectives. So well, brand awareness is sort of an obvious use case for advertisers to use our audience network for we've also seen a lot of our clients use it for consideration and bottom of funnel campaigns as well. Lipika Gimmler We also as a team recently figured out that the LinkedIn Audience Network, if you're using the single image ad placement, you can build your single image ad retargeting audience very quickly. So those are some of the great things I hear you loud and clear for the results that you've seen across these other clients. Peter, what about you? Peter Turner Yeah, you know, it's not just for branding. As Lipika talked about, AJ, we've all seen customers leveraging LinkedIn Audience Network for bottom funnel objectives as well. I didn't get to work with our customers as much. But these examples are so impressive, this one sticks out to me. There was a client who's a leading provider of business cloud communications, who use the audience can work as a way to help their team connect the brand initiatives to business outcomes and saw 65% Lower CPMs while driving 93 times more conversions from CTOs the audience that mattered most to them. And another interesting use case we've seen recently is one in APAC, where an agency client enabled LinkedIn Audience Network for their branding campaign and then built a retargeting campaign afterwards, to retarget audience reach via LinkedIn on instant work enabled campaigns via Legion forms. And they saw a 2x increase in Legion form converts as a result. It's kind of like that example you were talking about AJ building that retargeting audience from a LinkedIn Audience Network campaign. AJ Wilcox We were so excited when we found out that the audience network could build your retargeting audience. I mean, anytime we're going after an audience on LinkedIn, you have to have a minimum of 300 people. It can take a while to build a retargeting audience and 300 people, but it built very quickly on the audience. So I think that's way cool. Here's a quick sponsor break and then we'll dive into the rest of the interview. The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. AJ Wilcox If you're a B2B company and care about getting more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, then chances are LinkedIn Ads are for you. But the platform isn't easy to use, and can be painfully expensive on the front end. At B2Linked, we've cracked the code to maximizing ROI, while minimizing costs. Our methodology includes building and executing LinkedIn Ads strategies customized to your unique needs and tailored to the way that B2B consumers buy today. Over the last 11 years, we've worked with some of the largest LinkedIn Ad spenders in the world, we've spent over $150 million on the platform, and we're official LinkedIn partners. If you want to generate more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, book a discovery call today at B2Linked.com/apply. We'd absolutely love the opportunity to get to work with you. Alright, let's go ahead and jump back into the interview. AJ Wilcox So what some of the work that goes behind the scenes and ensuring that LinkedIn's Audience Network is brand safe, and that advertisers have the controls that they need. Peter Turner AJ, this is one of my favorite questions and one that you know, we spend a lot of time at LinkedIn, a lot of work goes on behind the scenes. So at its core, we want to make sure that marketers feel really confident running off LinkedIn just as much as they do on LinkedIn. And we continuously work to uphold LinkedIn brand safety standards, across both the feed and the Audience Network. There's both manual and automated brand safety checks that we perform as a team. And we partner with industry leaders, such as iOS, DoubleVerify and Pixelate to filter out low quality inventory across the network. And we also have an in house team that manually invests and audits publishers regularly, to make sure that we're prioritizing publishers based on performance and audience engagement to maintain the quality of a network. This is core to what we deliver for our marketers, and really important for my team to get right. Lipika Gimmler Yeah, and in addition to all of the fantastic under the hood protections that Peter mentioned that essentially come out of the box with a LinkedIn Audience Network, something that we're really, really excited to announce, the launch of this quarter is a brand new brand safety hub, where an advertiser can actually design their own brand safety guardrails to reach their desired professional audiences across third party apps and sites, while still remaining aligned with their brand safety needs. So with this new brand safety hub that we've launched, what people can essentially do is number one, they can download and review the entire list of publishers that make up the LinkedIn Audience Network. So as to, you know, take a look at them and ensure there's transparency into what makes up our audience network. In addition to this, they can also create an upload, custom allow lists and custom block lists to be very specific in identifying the publishers that they want their brand messages to appear on. And finally, we also have introduced a new feature where advertisers can now import and apply their own DoubleVerify powered authentic brand suitability and custom contextual targeting profiles to the LinkedIn Audience Network campaigns. So this is a brand new partnership that we've forged with an industry leader like DoubleVerify. So it's a pretty fantastic new feature that can be leveraged by advertisers who use DV in their campaigns. So in addition to all of these new features, we also have category blocking, which essentially leverages tech lab content taxonomy categories, at the campaign level. So a ton of customization, a ton of manual controls that our advertisers can apply in setting up their brand safety guardrails is what they can look forward to, in addition to the automated checks that are already in place within the product. AJ Wilcox Lipika, I have to say, I'm a huge fan of the new brand safety hub. Some of the initial exploration that we did, as soon as we found out that we could upload our own targeting and block lists, we thought, well, hey, what if we started showing ads just to apps, maybe for something like a mobile app? Or what if we blocked apps and just showed to publishers, and we wouldn't have had that level of control without the brand safety hub. So props to you guys for releasing that. That was a really cool release. Lipika Gimmler Yeah, absolutely. It was something that was a top asked by a lot of our customers. And we're really, really excited to be able to bring them to life and encourage anybody and everybody who is sort of on the edge of wanting to test out the LinkedIn Audience Network to kind of give it a go and see how it works out for them from a brand safety perspective, specifically, and obviously, feedback is always welcome. AJ Wilcox So Lipika, I know this is kind of your wheelhouse. I'm curious to ask about what the future of the LinkedIn Audience Network looks like. Lipika Gimmler Yeah, absolutely. So the future for the LinkedIn Audience Network is absolutely bright. And our teams are consistently working to introduce new ad formats and ad placements that are exclusive to the LinkedIn Audience Network. As I mentioned, prior LinkedIn Audience Network is considered to be a core part of our advertising solution. So there's a lot of investment from an r&d perspective, and a lot of investment in terms of really soliciting what our customers are looking for, in terms of what's going to bring them value. So we really are looking to further fortify LinkedIn as a whole as the B2B marketing partner of choice for brands and agencies and the LinkedIn Audience Network is a key component to how we're going to get there. So we're really excited to what's in development. But at this point, there's a lot of under the hood work that's being done. But we're happy to share more about it in the coming months, hopefully, on a future episode that we might be able to guest on again with yourself, AJ, AJ Wilcox Perfect. Well, we'd sure love to have you back for any new developments. That'd be fantastic. Always. So excited to see how fast LinkedIn is moving at coming out with new features, and especially around the LinkedIn Audience Network, I've noticed, I'll be inside of campaign manager and just see something new and go, wow, I didn't even know they were working on that, especially like the brand safety hub, those awesome. We had an episode several back about the cookieapocalypse that's happening. I'm curious how the cookieapocalypse is affecting the LinkedIn Audience Network, especially after chrome stops respecting third party cookies. What can we expect? Lipika Gimmler Yeah, that's really great and a very timely question, because it's definitely top of mind for a lot of folks in our industry. And this is one that our team has really been focused on for the past few quarters to address and to find meaningful solutions for. Ultimately, it boils down to the fact that the LinkedIn Audience Network, again, is truly an extension of LinkedIn, with the anchoring feature being LinkedIn's zero and first party data, our targeting data, that is really second to none when it comes to professional audience targeting. So along with these deterministic data assets, we rely on our proprietary privacy enhancing group identity solution, which essentially leverages LinkedIn first party data to group members based on shared professional attributes. So examples of this could be title or seniority. And this essentially enables us to reach professionals at scale through our first party data and not individual trackers. So we've truly think that B2B can be better served by using group level, and other privacy enhancing solutions that are rooted in this proprietary first party professional data. And with our audience network, advertisers can harness the power of LinkedIn's targeting to really accelerate their marketing outcomes across a network of vetted publishers where their audience is engaging the most. And they're able to do so while enhancing member privacy in an evolving identity landscape. So the investments we're making across LinkedIn within this particular space is definitely being bolstered within the LinkedIn Audience Network as well. AJ Wilcox Perfect. So it doesn't sound like we should be afraid of cookieapocalypse happening, it's not going to shut the LinkedIn Audience Network down. Lipika Gimmler Not at all it is in fact being thought of at the forefront of all of this innovation. So you know, we'd recommend we encourage our advertisers to leverage the Audience Network to really reach their audiences at scale, because it's not something we're necessarily afraid of at this point, but we're actually thriving in the current environment. AJ Wilcox Beautiful to hear. So as we are turning on LinkedIn Audience Network campaigns, and we've been testing them quite a bit, we've noticed that when you turn something on, it's going to react in the auction slightly differently. So I love to ask, like, how does the LinkedIn Audience Network interact within the auction for LinkedIn traffic? How might you scope the right balance of ensuring that you have as much traffic going towards on network as LinkedIn Audience Network? Peter Turner So at LinkedIn, we work to maximize marketing outcomes for all of our customers across all the available placements we have. It's really based on what they're trying to achieve a scale. So our platform algorithms work to show brand messages across both feed and LinkedIn Audience Network that match an average professional target audience first, and then based on the campaigns objective second, and, and at the same time, while considering their budget in bid type. And again, the priority is to drive you know maximum key results, as per their objectives at the lowest cost. And this ultimately decides how impressions are split across the LinkedIn Audience Network and our feed, as our ad platform behaves in a placement agnostic matter, and considers all available placements at par with each other. This also helps ensure that advertising on LinkedIn is seamless and data driven, while being anchored in our robust and proprietary professional audience graph for member interactions with LinkedIn. One suggestion for advertisers, as I'm thinking about the problem presented, you know, prefer testing and monitoring a campaign or forums across, you know, the LinkedIn Audience Network and their feed distinctly would be to run parallel AB campaigns, one with LinkedIn audience network enabled and one without while mimicking the exact same campaign parameters. This way we can assume that 90% of LinkedIn Audience Network enabled campaigns will deliver on LinkedIn Audience Network, while the other would be pure feed campaigns, and better the chance of reaching professionals across both the feed and LinkedIn Audience Network semi-equally. AJ Wilcox And that's exactly what I'd recommend to because you can't run just a LinkedIn Audience Network campaign. So duplicating both campaigns having one set to do the LinkedIn Audience Network, the other set to be LinkedIn only. That's a great way of AB testing the campaigns, so I'm a fan of that approach. All right, so final question for both of you. What are you both professionally and personally most excited for right now or this year. Lipika Gimmler Yeah, I'm personally really excited to see more B2B marketers leveraging the LinkedIn Audience Network and finding interesting use cases for it in their marketing campaigns. A ton of times we connect, when we connect with our advertisers, we find use cases that we hadn't even thought about in the first place. So it's really, really engaging for us to connect with our clients and learn about how they're utilizing the audience network within their toolkit. And there are so many learnings that are to be had by experimenting with the LinkedIn Audience Network and unlocking test budgets for it. So I'd really encourage all of the marketers who are tuning into this episode to connect with your LinkedIn account team, and explore ways by which you can expand the possibilities of what can be accomplished by tapping into, you know, LinkedIn and the LinkedIn Audience Network to achieve your B2B marketing dreams and ambitions. AJ Wilcox Love that. And, Peter, same question to you. Peter Turner This is a fun one for me. So I've got two young boys at home, one and three. And so I'm getting a ton of energy and excitement, watching them learn and grow. And as much as I think about my work at LinkedIn, and specifically on the Audience Network, I spent a lot of time reading about parenting, and how to raise kind kids, and connect it back. That multi dimensional sense of who we all are, is really the key to LinkedIn Audience Network, I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, but I also spend time elsewhere. And the value that the audience member creates is for marketers to reach me in multiple ways. And I'm very excited about that. AJ Wilcox I'm excited to hear congratulations on being an amazing parent who cares, and is trying to raise kind of children. That's awesome. This kind of concludes the questions I had, do either of you have anything else that you want to add? Lipika Gimmler At this point? Not really, I think this was a fantastic opportunity to really connect with your audience and to chat with you, AJ about, you know, what the foundational concepts are that the LinkedIn Audience Network was founded upon, and just all of the excitement that we have for what's to come. So we're really grateful for the opportunity and the time here, and we hope to come back and share more about, you know, the product roadmap, and maybe talk with customers and learn more about some of the use cases that are using the audience network for so again, appreciate the chance to chat today. Peter Turner And AJ, from mindset, you know, like the open to it, we've known each other for six or so years now working across, you know, various solutions at LinkedIn. And it's great to be on the podcast, and thank you for all you do to champion you know, and and support that LinkedIn marketer. It's not unusual for me to have a question about how to run a LinkedIn ad campaign and think to ask you first, and so I really think of you as an expert on what you do. And so thank you for the time today. AJ Wilcox Well, thank you, Peter. Thank you Lipika! Grateful that you would come and share so deeply with us and answer all my terrible questions. So much appreciate it! And have a great rest of your day. Lipika Gimmler Thank you. Thank you. AJ Wilcox 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. AJ Wilcox Alright! I hope you enjoyed the interview. I wanted to walk you through some great resources we've got for you. If you're looking to learn more about LinkedIn Ads, look no further than the course that I did on LinkedIn Learning all about LinkedIn Ads. You'll find the link in the show notes below. It is by far the most detailed, the least expensive, and the highest production value course out there, so check it out. If this is the first episode you've heard, congratulations, we're excited that you found us. Make sure to hit that subscribe button on whatever podcast player you're listening to. We'd love to have you back next week. But if this is not your first time listening, I would ask you please do leave us a review. Most of these reviews are done in the Apple podcasts section, but if you have anywhere else that will let you leave a review, please do. It truly means a lot to me. With any questions, suggestions, or corrections, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. We're cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: LinkedIn Ads Group on LinkedIn NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Youtube Channel Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript On LinkedIn Ads, you can target members by specific groups that they're in. By name! I know right? We're talking about targeting LinkedIn groups 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! The ability to target the members of specific groups on LinkedIn has been a blessing to advertisers since LinkedIn came out back in 2008. I can hear you Facebook advertisers out there salivating, because Facebook has never allowed us to do this. And it really would be incredible. Groups on LinkedIn had been through quite the journey over the years. But on today's episode of the LinkedIn Ads show, I'll walk you through the pros and cons, as well as some tips on how to use it and make it work even better. Make sure to stick around until the end of the episode, as I'm going to share a little known hack to targeting groups. Let's hit it. First off, what are LinkedIn groups? When I very first joined LinkedIn, groups were one of the things that were most widely publicized as it being a great place to interact with others. So I went and joined a bunch of marketing groups, a bunch of technology groups, and a bunch of automotive groups even. Being a new marketer. and being really into cars, I went and joined one of these automotive groups, and ended up having a conversation with a marketer from Ferrari, I thought that was so cool back in the day. Over time, those LinkedIn groups have kind of turned into a bit of a dumping ground due to a wide variety of factors that have made LinkedIn groups less attractive than, let's say meta groups. People stopped actually coming to interact in groups and the ones who did were usually just going to help promote something of themselves. So they became kind of a spammy link dumping ground. If you go look at your groups that you're a member of just look through and see, I would say every once in a while you find a group where there's real conversation going on people actually helping each other and making suggestions, but for the most part, I just see link after link after link with very little explanation as to why someone is even putting a link there. And when you're in a group, and all you see is basically a bunch of bots that are dumping content and leaving, you're not going to stick around either. But anyone can go and start a group on the platform, and it's free. If you're a marketer, which you probably are if you're listening to this, you can go and join a group called marketing executives group, or digital marketing optimization, or digital marketing manager and agency owners. What's really cool about these groups is you get a bunch of people who are like minded in the group together. And because it's on LinkedIn, it's really easy to tell who is who, what companies they represent. And because of the lack of anonymity, I think people tend to be a lot kinder, and a lot more helpful. Also, being part of a group is really cool when you go to actually make a connection with someone because now you have something more in common with them than just, I saw your posts show up in my newsfeed, you can say something like we're in a common group together, we've had a conversation. So common groups membership can be a really good way of getting the attention of someone and getting a connection request accepted. So we talked about how LinkedIn groups have kind of devolved over time. But something that I really appreciated about it is that most of the time, you're not going to leave a group, you're just going to stop going to visit very often. So what that means is someone goes and joins a group around a topic that's really important to them. And even if they're not spending time in that group, LinkedIn still knows that they're a member of this and then we can target that trait using LinkedIn Ads. And it's an important distinction to note that, when we're targeting using groups names on LinkedIn, it doesn't mean that we're targeting them with ads only when they're in the group. Rather, we're targeting them wherever they are on LinkedIn, because we know that they are a member of this group. So even if they never come back, we can still use it for targeting. And you can join up to 50 groups last time I checked. And in the show notes below, there's a link to the LinkedIn Ads group on LinkedIn. And it's one of the good examples I can think of. They're doing a really good job of curating it, keeping the spam out, and there are a lot of people, they're asking really sincere questions about the platform. 4:21 So when should you use groups targeting? I think it's really important to compare the other different methods of targeting that you could use to see really where groups fits in. So if you're targeting by job function, a lot of times that's way too broad. I would fit under the job function of marketing. But because LinkedIn ads is such a specific skill, and not every marketer has that skill. And so Job function is oftentimes very, very broad, especially in my case. Skills are even too broad. Sometimes, you can list up to 50 skills in your profile, just like groups, and it's another one that a lot of people will list skills and then forget to remove them later. Skills can be too broad sometimes as well. Of course, we can also target by job title. But titles can be too restrictive. And groups targeting tends to produce very small audiences. But think about it, if someone went way out of their way at some point on the platform to go and join a bunch of groups around topics they cared about, they're probably going to be a lot more active and engaged on the platform. So think about it this way. They produce small, but mighty audiences. Because of this groups tend to be a very underutilized targeting method for my experience. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into how to select groups to target. The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. 5:49 If you're a B2B company and care about getting more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, then chances are LinkedIn ads are for you. But the platform isn't easy to use, and can be painfully expensive on the front end. Here at B2Linked, we've cracked the code to maximizing ROI, while minimizing costs. Our methodology includes building and executing LinkedIn ad strategies, customized to your unique needs, and tailored to the way B2B consumers buy today. Over the last 11 years, we've worked with some of the largest LinkedIn advertisers in the world, we've spent over $150 million on the platform, and we're official LinkedIn partners. If you want to generate more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, book a discovery call today at B2Linked.com/apply, we'd absolutely love the chance to get to work with you. All right, let's jump into how to actually select the groups that you might want to target. There's a couple of ways that you might do this. The first is you can go on to LinkedIn, click on their search feature, their universal search, and just start typing keywords for the types of groups that you might want to join. You could then filter that search just to the names of groups. And you'll see quite a few options there. Group membership is also something that's on someone's profile. So another way you could go about this is start doing some persona research. Go and look at the LinkedIn profiles of those within your ideal customer persona. They may even be your current customers, and scroll down to their group section and see which groups they belong to. If you start to notice some of the more common ones, you could add them to your targeting. Another way that you can select groups to target is to go in and actually try this targeting method. And inside of campaign manager, you go to audience attributes, interests and traits, and then member groups. And you can start by just typing the keyword that you might care about. So for instance, if I was going to target marketers like myself, I could type in something like marketing. And LinkedIn would suggest about 20 different groups, all about marketing. Or I could type LinkedIn Ad. And the only option I really see here is LinkedIn advertisers group, which happens to be the one that I suggested earlier to go and look for a good example of. It may be helpful to you to try to find groups that have larger audience sizes within them. Because sometimes they're too small to be meaningful. If you're targeting a whole bunch of groups that have like 10 people in them, maybe those are just a waste of space. Or you could do a ton of tiny ones, and try to get enough audience members to try to make your audience large enough to run or be successful. But whichever direction you decide to go, realize that you can only target 100 of anything inside of campaign manager. Except for companies, you can target 200 companies at a time. So that means if you've found over 100 groups to target, you'll want to weed it out and go with only the larger ones and leave the smaller ones out. As you're reviewing these groups within campaign manager, if you hang over the question mark next to the group name, it'll show a little pop up saying how many people are in the group. And as you hover over that, you'll see the group size. That can be helpful in narrowing things down. Sometimes I'll hear people bashing groups targeting on LinkedIn, they'll say things like, well, are people even active in LinkedIn groups? Or do they even join them? We kind of addressed this earlier, when we said that when someone goes and joins a group, they don't often leave the group. And so they're still attached to it for targeting. And so even if they're not active, they're signaling that they have a large affinity towards this topic. And that can help us a lot in our targeting. Do people join groups? Not really, LinkedIn even tried to do a refresh of groups a few years back, trying to revive them? And spoiler alert, it didn't work very well. There was a lot of talk about what it was going to do, how revolutionary it was going to be. But in the end groups didn't change all that much. I don't think they did enough of an overhaul. So it seems like LinkedIn is not proud of their group's product anymore. Because if they weren't proud of it, they would be pushing it. They would try to be recommending to members more groups that they should join, but instead what we see is they kind of hide it. It's really difficult to even go and find groups even when you're looking for them. So that means when you are using groups targeting, you're gonna get small audience sizes, and they're probably not growing all too much. When you're using groups targeting criteria, I like to layer other targeting criteria on top. Things like seniority and company size, and company, industry, and all of that. So it really is right for using. Groups really can be a good place to play as an organic marketing method. The trick is that you just have to start real conversation. You can't turn into a link dumping spammer and expect to have any sort of real interaction in the groups. Get in, actually interact with people, don't just dump links. And anytime you do share a link, make sure you provide enough information about why it is you think what you're sharing is valuable. Then actually connect with other like minded people who are engaging like you are. One cool thing that groups have done here in the last few years, is that group posts are now sometimes shown in your newsfeed. You'd have to wait around hoping that people go back into the group to see your stuff. Now, the best group stuff is actually going to show up in your newsfeed. 11:06 All right, I did promise a hack here towards the end. This is a trick that I've used now for years, that when you are targeting by groups, if you type in a keyword, let's say you type in something like marketing, LinkedIn is only going to suggest 20 different groups to you. And if you like all of them, and you've selected all 20, that's the absolute max you can target. Like LinkedIn is not going to show you any others. Until you do what I call the ABC trick. I have to give credit for this trick to my very first LinkedIn Ads rep. She showed me back in 2011, how to do this, the platform has advanced quite a bit, but this still works, there still isn't a better way. So what you do is you type your keyword. And then after you've exhausted those 20 suggestions, you do a space and then A and then LinkedIn is going to suggest the 20 that match that starting with an A and then you select whatever suggestions there, that's maybe another 20, you delete your A and you go back and do B, then you go and do C, then you go and do D, you go all the way through the alphabet. And Lincoln's gonna keep showing you suggestions and by the time you've gotten to the end of the alphabet, you've really found most groups. And in fact, if there are so many that you're going after, you're gonna get over 100 and then you're gonna have to decide which ones do I take out anyway. 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. All right, like we talked about the LinkedIn Ads group, there's the link right in the show notes that you can go and join. Get involved in conversation about LinkedIn ads, it really is a great example of a group. Also, if you or anyone you know, is looking to learn more about LinkedIn Ads, make sure you check out the course on LinkedIn Learning that I did with LinkedIn. It teaches a lot of the same principles as we go over here on this podcast, but it's very high quality and very inexpensive to use. I think it's like 10 bucks to buy the course. A lot of people even get LinkedIn Learning for free with their elevated LinkedIn profile. But definitely go check that out. If this is your first time listening, welcome. Thanks so much! I'm glad to have you here. Make sure to hit that subscribe button and your podcast player so you keep hearing us here in the future. If this is not your first time listening, please do us the favor of leaving a review for the podcast. You probably hear it a lot. I know I say it every time, but it really is the very best way you can say thanks for all the content that we put out. With any questions, suggestions, or corrections, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives!

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Covid19's Effect on LinkedIn Ads Bidding and Budgeting NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Youtube Channel Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Follower Ads (Red call-out boxes) Follower Ads impressions were decimated on both Thanksgiving and Christmas. Since these are only served on Desktop, it shows how few people were on LinkedIn on their desktops. The other ad formats didn't see such large decreases, telling us that members largely switched over to mobile during the holidays. Follower Ads costs skyrocketed on holidays. An indication of what happens to prices when to the audience vacates the platform while advertisers are still bidding. Single Image Sponsored Content (Purple call-out boxes) Single Image Sponsored Content impressions were above average the day before Thanksgiving but dropped to 80% and 68% during and after. Signals many people taking time off work and not spending as much time on LinkedIn. The day before and day of Christmas was interesting to see an increase in impressions, although these were weekend days which are traditionally lower anyway and wouldn’t be hard to beat. The day after New Years (January 2 nd ) saw 17% higher-than-average usage, which is what we expect to see. Costs around Thanksgiving skyrocketed to 35%, 52%, and 69% above average, making for very expensive traffic. Around Christmas, costs were elevated 3-16%, which is up, but not egregious. New Years costs were really surprising though. They actually dropped from 1-33% of average, which is what we usually see after the New Year, but to see the diminished costs during the holiday was interesting. We would guess this is due to advertisers pulling back; although I don’t understand why advertisers would pull back en masse for New Years but not at Christmas just a week before, unless it had something to do with running out of budgets by the end of the month and needing to pull back. Video Ads (Blue call-out boxes) The day before Thanksgiving was pretty much business as usual, but we definitely saw fewer impressions the day of and the day after Thanksgiving. Christmas Eve was up 6% but the day of and the day after were down to 81% and 54% of average. New Years Eve had lower impressions which we’d expect given the holiday, but similar to Sponsored Content (since they share the same inventory) were up 11% and 7% respectively. Thanksgiving CPMs were elevated 3-31%, but Christmas did not follow suit, strangely. Christmas CPMs actually dropped 11-32%, which I don’t have an explanation for. New Years CPMs also dropped significantly, but we expect that for the same reasons we see decreased costs around New Years every year. But a drop between 50%-71% is huge! After New Years Analysis Unsurprisingly, impressions and clicks increased after the New Year (1/3-1/5) since we’re back to work and all rested up from time off for the holidays.  What is surprising is that costs on Follower Ads were still elevated by 11% even after the holidays.   Show Transcript What happens to your LinkedIn Ads on holidays and vacation? Well, it's a total pain to calculate. So I went ahead and did it. I can do hard things. We're talking a holiday ad 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, I'm sure you've wondered if you should pause your ads on holidays, or just let them ride? Well, I'm a total data junkie so I took it upon myself to crunch the data and find out and it gets juicy. We're gonna walk through it and analysis that I did over a lot of data to tell you conclusively whether or not you should be advertising on LinkedIn over holidays. And make sure to stick around until the end for an extra bonus analysis that I did about ad performance after the new year. All right, let's hit it. If you've been listening for a while, you may remember Episode 32, where I did a whole analysis of what happened to LinkedIn Ads availability, and pricing during the COVID 19 pandemic. And I really enjoyed doing that study. It was a ton of data crunching, but a lot of fun. Well, and we get asked all the time by clients whether or not we should be pausing over the holidays, especially in November and December here in the US, where we have Thanksgiving and Christmas, followed closely by New Years. In the past, we've oftentimes given the advice to pause entirely over those holidays. And there are a lot of reasons why. The first is that it's towards the end of a quarter and a month so these larger companies are bidding more aggressively to try to finish strong. And this is going to lead to increased competition, which means you're going to pay more at these times. It also happens to be the end of a year. So budgets that are use it or lose it, they have to be spent. So advertisers are again bidding up and this is leading to increased competition and costs. And meanwhile, people are traveling and taking more time off due to the holidays. This leads to less time spent on LinkedIn, which means fewer impressions to go around. And so more advertisers fighting over those. It's really important to understand that what you pay on LinkedIn, it's all an auction. And the auction is driven by supply and demand. The supply is the people on LinkedIn that are logged in and ready to receive ad impressions. The demand is our demand as marketers trying to get in front of them. And we're bidding in order to do so. So what we pay right now is this interplay of people being on LinkedIn, and US advertisers trying to get in front of them. So when the supply of LinkedIn visitors decreases, all else held equal, our costs are gonna go up. But in this case, where your visitors decrease, and competition increases, it means your overall advertiser costs are going to skyrocket, which is obviously not great if you're trying to be efficient with your advertising. If you're using manual bidding during these times, you kind of have a hedge, or a bit of insurance when costs are going up. Because when costs rise, you're naturally just going to lose more auctions. And so when those costs get over your bids, you just naturally leave the auction. And then of course, when costs come back down, you'll be back to receiving traffic the way that you were. If you're using LinkedIn's maximum delivery of bidding, though, you're just going to ride that wave of high costs all the way up, and then back down, and you'll be subjected to whatever is happening on the platform. Costs can spike with no warning whatsoever. And those high costs are especially a problem since the platform doesn't allow you to do any sort of timing of your ads. So if you want to pause your campaigns or pause certain ads, it has to be done manually. Or in our case, we ended up building an internal de partying and ad scheduling tool. So that that wouldn't be a downside for us. But we realize most people aren't going to have something like that at their disposal. And we've talked a lot about costs increasing, which is totally a huge factor in whether you should be advertising over the holidays. But there's something else to keep in mind. It's lead quality, we found something that is the same every single year. And that is any demo or call scheduled, 95% of time it's going to get pushed back to after the new year. Just think about it. How many calls have you said, hey, let's push this into the new year. Well, now you've pushed a meeting forward potentially several weeks. So by the time you actually go to do that meeting, you've most likely forgotten entirely who this person was and why you wanted to talk to them. So over the holidays, if you're paying more for those leads, just to leave them cooling over the holidays. Obviously, it's not a great combination. And this is what we've seen in past years. But my question was, does it still hold up today? I always like to test my assumptions and see what platform changes have happened. I was actually spurred on to do this because I had six different LinkedIn reps, all pushing really hard, saying that we should be advertising over the holidays. Some even went as far to say that costs drop over the holidays. This wasn't the case from what I've experienced in the past so I really want to do this analysis. And I'm ashamed to say that this analysis took 31 hours of my life, I started and it was pretty straightforward. And then I kept coming across cool data points that I wanted to study and dive deeper into, I had to restart three times. And I'm certain that if I were really really insanely good at Excel, this probably wouldn't have taken this long. But let's jump into the methodology. I had some requirements. First of all, we needed these accounts to be decent spending. But they also had to be spending similarly. So we hand picked accounts that were spending between about $15,000 to $20,000 a month. They also had to be really similar in brand strength so we picked very well known companies in their space. And all of these accounts happened to be in the Fortune 1,000. We also wanted to make sure that the ads were similar in focus, and they were using similar ad types. We didn't want to combine one account that was running text ads, and another one running sponsored messaging, and then another one running sponsored content. We pretty much scored the jackpot, because we had five accounts that match this criteria. They were good spenders, but they were also similar. They were all Fortune 1000. So they're gonna be really well known across the board. They were all running the same ad formats, we really couldn't pass this opportunity on. As we dove in, though, we realized that there were several variables that had to be controlled for. The first was whether or not this was a weekend or a weekday. For example, Christmas Eve, Christmas, New Year's Eve, and New Year's Day, we're all on weekends this year. We didn't want to compare a holiday to a normal weekday, or even a combined average of weekdays and weekends, since weekends and weekdays both act very differently on LinkedIn. Plus, the days after each of these holidays were a weekday. It was Monday. And of course, we needed to be able to tease out the difference between a holiday Monday and a normal Monday. Thanksgiving was really kind to us, it made sure that the holiday itself as well as the days before and after were all weekdays, which made it much easier to analyze. Oh boy, I wish I could have just thrown out weekends and weekdays differences, it would have saved me a lot of time. The next variable we had to control for was ad type. If you were to calculate the click through rate across multiple ad formats, let's say for instance, sponsored content and text ads, the average would be absolutely meaningless. You can't average sponsored content and text ads together. Sponsored content has like a .44% average click through rate, while text ads have a .025%. So text ads have a click through rate that's like 1/12 of the average sponsored content. Plus text ads show way more impressions because there's not much of a frequency cap. And so if you're showing both of those ad formats to the same size of audience, your text ads are going to show a lot more impressions. And that would totally sway your click through rate to a much lower number that really wouldn't make sense. So all this to say that in this analysis, I had to break out the different ad formats so that cost per click and cost per impression would actually be meaningful. For metrics to track I knew costs, were going to be the one that was my main concern. And I started out by using cost per click. And then I realized occasionally there were days with no clicks, and then I'd have a zero in a denominator. And nobody likes seeing error divided by zero in their Excel. So I ended up adding in CPM as well. And it was nice to show them alongside. And then CPM never has a problem with a zero and a denominator. And the final variable to control for was account changes. These had to be accounts that couldn't make any major changes to adds to bidding and budgets. And in cases in these accounts where there was a major change, we just threw out any day where those changes were made. The result of all of this was over 121,000 rows of data to be crunched, and a 60 megabyte Excel file. So the sample sizes were pretty robust, and the findings were strong as well. Okay, we're gonna jump to a quick sponsor break and then we'll get to dive into the actual results of the analysis. The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. 9:38 If you're a B2B company and care about getting more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, then chances are LinkedIn Ads are for you. But the platform isn't easy to use and can be painfully expensive on the front end. At B2Linked, we've cracked the code to maximizing ROI while minimizing costs. Our methodology includes building and executing LinkedIn Ads strategies, customized to your unique needs, and tailored to the way that B2B consumers buy today. Over the last 11 years, we've worked with some of LinkedIn's largest advertisers in the world, we've spent over $150 million on the platform, and we're official LinkedIn partners. If you want to generate more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, book a discovery call at B2Linked.com/apply. We'd absolutely love the opportunity to get to work with you. 10:31 All right, let's jump into the results of the holiday analysis. And don't forget to stick around until the end for that bonus analysis that I know you'll love. If you go to the show notes page, you'll see a paste of all of the data that I'm going to be talking about. So I'm just going to describe to you what it is that you're seeing. The first column is the holiday that we're talking about. So you'll see Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's There, you'll also see a column for ad type. Underneath ad type, you'll see the acronyms FA, which is a follower ad, which is one of the dynamic ad formats. You'll see SC, which is short for sponsored content. And it's specifically single image sponsored content. Because we also have VI for video ads, which is also technically sponsored content, it uses the same inventory. Then you'll see a column called Day. And what that is, is we tracked the day before the holiday, the day of the holiday and the day after. So we could paint the whole story of what's happening as the week progresses on holiday week. Then you'll see all the data, the data are all percentages have an average day of its kind. So if you see the column of impressions, we're showing you how many impressions Christmas Day got, as opposed to a normal Sunday. Because these are a percentage of benchmark, if you see anything that's under 100%, it indicates that there were less of that that day than there are on a normal benchmark day. So impressions, for instance, if you say less than 100%, on impressions, that indicates that there were fewer impressions served that day than average. Clicks is the same way. If you see less than 100% clicks, that means that there were fewer clicks that happened. But I think what's even more interesting is that when you see the clicks percentage is higher than the impressions percentage, that tells us that people were more active that day at clicking. Our CTRs went up that day, which is pretty cool. You'll see a column for spend and this is just the ability to tell our campaigns on average, able to spend more or less or about the same. It's the spend ability of campaigns on that day. The next column is CPC or cost per click. And again, seeing less than 100% indicates that campaigns have lower average costs per click than average. If it's over 100%. That means average costs per click were higher than average. Makes sense, right? You will see some blanks under the cost per click heading. And that's because there were some days where follower ads didn't get any clicks and so rather than having a really ugly divide by zero error, I just deleted them out. But the next column is for CPM or cost per 1000 impressions. This is likely a better way of gauging costs than CPC, just because this was how we were getting charged regardless of if people were clicking or not. And again, less than 100% indicates that campaigns were spending less than average, over 100% means that we're getting gouged a little bit. Alright, let's start specifically with follower ads, because they were really interesting. In the graphic, these are the red call out boxes. So anytime that you see a red box around data that was dealing with follower ads. What was interesting is that follower ads impressions were decimated on both Thanksgiving and Christmas. Literally impressions were around 10%. But since these are only served on desktop, that shows us how few people were actually on LinkedIn on their desktop machines. Since the other ad formats show on mobile, and we didn't see such large decreases, that tells us that members largely switched over to mobile devices during those holidays. Then when we look at costs, follower ads costs skyrocketed across all holidays. And to me, this is a perfect example of supply versus demand. The supply of advertisers stayed constant because LinkedIn doesn't allow us to do ad scheduling and leave the auction. Meanwhile, the demand of advertisers stayed constant because LinkedIn doesn't allow us to pause our ads certain times and take ourselves out of the auction. And at the same time the supply of members on the platform because they weren't there on desktop devices they left and that causes costs to shoot through the roof. For example, on the Thanksgiving holiday costs tripled, on Christmas, they almost doubled and on New Year's Day about doubled. Okay, so that's follower ads a little bit interesting. 14:56 Now let's move on to single image sponsored content. These were the ones in the purple call out boxes. So sponsored content impressions were above average the day before Thanksgiving, but then dropped to 80% and 68%. On the day during the holiday and after, this totally signals to me that people were working right up until the day before, and that during the holiday and after they went ahead and took time off, and weren't spending as much time on LinkedIn. The day before and the day of Christmas were really interesting to see an increase in impressions. And I didn't really have a great explanation as to why this was, although both of these were weekend days, which are traditionally lower anyway, and so it wouldn't be too hard to beat the average. The day after New Year's, this is January 2, we saw 17% higher than average usage, which is what we expect to see after the new year. And we'll tell you all about that data here soon. The costs around Thanksgiving skyrocketed to 35% to 69% above average, making it a really expensive holiday to be advertising. Around Christmas costs jumped 3% to 16%, which is certainly up, but it's not egregious. New Year's costs were really surprising though, they actually dropped one to 33% of average, which is what we usually see after the new year. But to see the diminished costs during the holiday was interesting, usually we see them after, we would guess that this is due to advertisers pulling back. Although I don't understand why advertisers would pull back on mass for New Years, but not Christmas that was just a week before. Unless, of course it had something to do with running out of budgets by the end of the month, and needing to pull back. Now let's analyze video ad. There were the blue call out boxes on the image that you see on the show notes page. If we look at the day before Thanksgiving, it was pretty much business as usual. But then we saw a huge dive in impressions on the day of and the day after Thanksgiving. The costs on Thanksgiving, though they jumped 3% to 31%. But strangely, Christmas didn't follow suit. Christmases CPMs actually dropped between 11% to 32%, which I don't really have an explanation for. New Year's Eve definitely had lower impressions, which we'd expect given the holiday. But similar to the other sponsored content that we've already talked about, since they do share the same inventory, the impressions were actually up 11% and 7%, respectively. And as you'd expect, New Year's CPMs dropped significantly, which we do expect usually, but it was a huge drop between 50% to 71% drops in price. 17:32 So my takeaways here are that generally costs go up over holidays. So I recommend pausing your ads over those times. And even in cases where costs will drop over the holidays like for Christmas and New Year's, I still recommend pausing your ads due to the lead quality drop. I would not suggest pausing your retargeting ads though. I think your retargeting ads are good to keep going. And remember how we talked about supply and demand, how it affects our pricing on LinkedIn. Let's talk about something that makes our pricing even worse. Rising costs are totally exacerbated by advertisers who are bidding by the impression rather than by the click. The reason this is the case is because when someone is bidding by click, they're only paying when someone actually takes action. And then the advertiser with the highest click through rates, ends up getting the best relevancy scores and that drives everyone to be better. If you're bidding by the impression though, it really doesn't matter how you're performing. Any advertiser willing to pay enough, LinkedIn is going to bypass the auction and start showing ads. LinkedIn has caused rising costs smartly on their part, but I think it's terrible, by making maximum delivery the default bidding method because it's the default, the less experienced advertisers just end up going with it. We talked about in episode six about when maximum delivery should be used. But it's effectively bidding by the impression but letting LinkedIn bid as high as they need to, to make sure that it can spend your entire budget every day. So if your daily budget is like $10 for a campaign, it may only need to bid like a $60 CPM to spend it all. But if your daily budget is high, let's say something like $1,000, and you have a relatively small audience, you might find that the platform has to bid $400 CPMs, in order to show your ads enough to spend your money. Just as a reminder, if your click through rates are two to three times the benchmark CTR for that ad format, then it's actually in your best interest to bid CPM as it saves you money. 90% of the time, though, you're not going to be beating your benchmarks by two to three times. And maximum delivery is the most expensive way to pay for your traffic. If you're bidding maximum delivery just because it's easier to spend your budget. You're just pushing yours and everyone else's costs up on the platform. And the only winner here is LinkedIn Corporate, who's watching their revenue climb quarter over quarter. So we as advertisers, what can we do about out this? I would encourage you don't bid max delivery unless you have really high CTRs. I would also encourage you to pause over holidays. And please don't bid really aggressively at the end of a year or a quarter or a month, if you don't have to. Because if we as advertisers stop pushing the costs up, then prices come down for all of us, then, who knows, maybe there are some advertisers out there who need to be bidding on holidays, and they end up getting lower costs to do so. Okay, I mentioned that if you're going to stick around to the end, I would share a bonus analysis with you. What we generally see is after the New Year, holiday performance tends to look really good on the platform. Costs come down, it becomes a lot easier to spend your full budget. So I wanted to do this analysis and to actually quantify this. First off, looking over three different ad formats, follower ads, single image sponsored content, and video ads, we average the 20% increase in impressions. And we saw clicks increased by 14%, which is pretty similar. It shows there's more people on LinkedIn spending time after the new year, and they're about as engaged as usual in clicking. When we look at costs, though, we see that follower ads have an 11% higher CPM, but cost per click is about the same. So that shows the difference made up of people actually clicking. Single image sponsored content, though, the costs actually dropped by 22% afterwards. And video costs actually dropped by 49% to the CPM, not bad. All of this goes to show that performance after the new year really is good. Takeaways from the New Year are advertise strong for the New Year. Traffic is up and costs are down and lead quality tends to be really high, too. Anecdotally, what we see is that now that people are back in the office, they're pretty rested from having a nice long break, they're a lot more likely to be agreeable towards having a meeting. There's not a whole lot of other stuff clouding up their schedule. Plus, they tend to have budgets again for the year which were depleted just the previous month. It's the beginning of a month and a quarter, so people don't feel like they have to bid super aggressively to try to finish things up strong. I absolutely love the first week of January every year. 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. 22:38 First off, the tables that I was reading off of, they're gonna be in the shownotes. So go visit the show notes page, if you want to see specifically what I was talking about there. Also, check out the link to Episode 32, all About COVID-19's effect on LinkedIn ads. Feel free to compare those and see this COVID-19 act more like a holiday or is it totally different. Check out Episode Six, all about bidding and budgeting to dive deeper into maximum delivery, and manual bidding and all of that. If you are one of your colleagues or looking to learn more about LinkedIn Ads, check out the link to the course that I made on LinkedInLearning.com, right within the show notes. It's by far the most detailed and lowest cost course out there and it's by LinkedIn Learning, so you know, the production is awesome. If this is the first time you're listening to us, make sure to hit that subscribe button, because you obviously care about LinkedIn Ads. If this is not the first time you're hearing this, though, can I ask a special favor? Can you go and rate and review this podcast in whatever podcast player you listen in? It would go a long way to say thanks for the 31 hours that I've sunk into this report. With any questions, suggestions, corrections, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.    

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: AdSearch LinkedIn Ads Library Sander's LinkedIn Profile NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Youtube Channel Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review!   Show Transcript Have you ever wanted a library of all the LinkedIn Ads out there that you could look through for inspiration? We've got just the thing for you coming up 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! I would bet that most of us have wished that we could go somewhere to look at the highest performing ads on the LinkedIn Ads platform, maybe for inspiration as we're writing new ad copy, or maybe even to look at competitors ads side by side and check out what they're doing. Today, I'm interviewing Sander de Lange, from AdSearch.io, which is a very affordable LinkedIn Ads library to do just that. We talked through what it's capable of pricing, and especially the actionable ways that you as the LinkedIn Ads marketer can go and use these tools to your advantage. Sander is an agency owner out of the Netherlands, and he's the founder of AdSearch.io. Let's bring him on. AJ Wilcox Hey Sander. So excited to have you here on the podcast. Sander de Lange Hey, AJ, great to be here! AJ Wilcox Cool. Well, tell me a little bit about yourself. Tell me a little bit about the company ad search. Love to hear all that background? Sander de Lange Yeah, sure. So about myself. I'm from the Netherlands. I'm married. And we just got our first daughter. AJ Wilcox Congratulations. Sander de Lange Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, me and my wife, we really love to travel. So currently, I'm working remote from Thailand, which is our favorite country in the whole world. AJ Wilcox Oh, I have not been but I want to. Sander de Lange Yes. AJ Wilcox Cool. Well, tell us about the background of AdSearch.io Sander de Lange Yeah, sure. Sure. 10 years ago, together with my business partner Ozlem, we launched a marketing agency called Team Digital.nl. In the Netherlands. We're focused on getting B2B customers. And we do a lot of LinkedIn Ads for our clients. We really love the platform because of the great targeting and great way to reach ideal customers. But we were really missing a LinkedIn Ads library. So yeah, this year in 2022, we launched AdSearch.io, which is the world's biggest LinkedIn Ads library to help you find great LinkedIn Ad examples to mobile in seconds. AJ Wilcox Love that. So tell us about why you were looking for a library. Obviously, that was a problem you were looking to solve for yourself. What is that problem that we LinkedIn advertisers should be thinking about whether we're feeling this or not? Sander de Lange Yeah, exactly. So the idea actually started because of a few few challenges we kept running into because if you advertise on LinkedIn, you probably know that LinkedIn Ads has a higher cost per click than other ad platforms, which can be a bit scary for people if they start launching their first campaign because every new campaign can be a risk. Some people also might notice that ads with low engagement actually pay more per click. So you know, the LinkedIn algorithm works with the ad relevancy score. And that's based on factors like click through rate, comments, likes and shares. And the more relevant the ad, the lower the price you pay. So this also means that if you have ads with low engagement, you pay more per click. So creating relevant, engaging ads is very important. And on top of that, we kept running into that you need also enough fresh new ad creative to prevent audience fatigue. And that's actually when your target audience sees the same ads over and over and your ads can lose their impact. We figured that you don't want to be wasting ad budget on the wrong boring ads, because that can get expensive. And we wanted to find a way to decrease that risk. And that's actually where you had something to do with this. Because I'm a frequent listener of your podcast and you actually quoted you, you said, like, when you're spending money on LinkedIn Ads, it's inherently high risk, because the costs are higher. So any research you can do ahead of time to find out what your audience will like is going to be very useful. So that inspired us to create AdSearch.io. AJ Wilcox Oh, so cool. I'm glad I can be of any help there. So you obviously felt this pain, you realize that we need some sort of an ad library? How did you go about solving? Sander de Lange Yeah, so we believe that it was missing. And as librarian and it's a great way to get inspiration for new campaigns, you need to study ads that are performing well to generate ideas. And we didn't just want to create the ads library where we just put a few ads in there. And that's it, we really wanted to go the extra mile and add all kinds of features and functionality, so you can really find highly relevant ads quickly. So we did that by adding a few type of features. The first one is the search features. So you can really find relevant ads quickly. You can search by keywords, the whole database of ads is searchable by keywords. So for example, you could search for CRM or email templates and find ads that contain those keywords. You can search by company name or even by URL. So for example, if you search URL search, and you use like read remarketing, you will find remarketing ads. So that's the search features, you can find relevant ads quickly. And then step two is the sorting features. So you can discover the most engaging ads very quickly. So you can sort by engagement metrics, like likes, shares, comments, you can find the ads your audience loved most. And then you can use the filter features to find exactly what you need. Like you can filter by country, industry, ad formats, company size, all kinds of stuff. So if you were looking for a video ads containing the keyword CRM from a US company in the 50 to 200, staff range, you can find it. AJ Wilcox Oh, that's so cool. So I love the standard. How should LinkedIn advertisers actually use your tool? Sander de Lange Yeah, so I'd like to get into like a really step by step process with just a high level overview. First, it's really useful for everybody advertising on LinkedIn, but mostly people who can use it as LinkedIn advertising agencies and freelancers. In house LinkedIn advertisers can use it, but also the ad creative design teams. And they can use it for campaign optimization to improve the success rates and generate A/B testing ideas. But also, it might be helpful for the sales team to find companies that advertise on LinkedIn so they can reach out to them. Yeah, and of course, we're competitive research to spy on the best ads in any industry. But if you want to get into the step by step process of how we use it in our agency, we could go through that. AJ Wilcox Yes, I would love to see the step by step. And my background here for asking is because I think with a lot of these tools that are just giving us ideas, it's really difficult to come up with actionable principles, a lot of things you might look at and just say, Oh, that looks pretty, it looks nice. That sounds good. But then when you actually go to take action, there isn't. So walk us through your method for how you use your own tool to research and launch ads, that would be really cool. Sander de Lange Yeah, let's go through three steps that we use for our clients to get a lot of value out of it. The first is the A/B testing an idea generation process. Step one would be like researching the ads. So for example, I opened the tool and search for the campaign subject by keywords. So let's say, email templates, or something like this, or CRM, the tool will generate results of ads containing those keywords. Then I would go in the left sidebar, and sort by most reactions, or most comments to find the most engaging ads, and then I'll start studying their strategy and try to generate two ideas I would want to test. For example, I want to test using lead gen forms versus landing pages or test a different offer or test some type of ad copy. I'd go through all the ads that end up at the top, for example, study their introductory test and generate two ideas I want to test, study the ad creative and the visual, generate and think of two ideas I'd want to test. For example, square image ads that you had been on about the CTR increases that that can get you versus the non square ones. I go to the headline, try to generate two ideas, but also click through to the landing page and see what they do there. And also study the comments that people leave on the ads, because if you click view original ads, you can see sometimes people leaving questions or some type of stuff like this, which can be good intelligence for your campaign. So that's step number one trying to see all of these add elements and generate ideas based on top of that, once you've generated the ideas, I tried to see if you go to the ad creation and launch process, so all of these ideas, I'd rank them based on the potential impact they have, the ease of implementation and decide which ones we can launch and use in our next campaign. I'd see if I can share the ad examples that we found in a tool with the design team. You can click show ad details and easily share them with the team. You can also bookmark the ads to find them back later, easily. Then your design team will create them. And then when you upload the ads, you make sure to give them very clear names inside of LinkedIn so you can easily find back and find the results for A/B test. And you write down in an Excel sheet your hypothesis on which KPI you will judge the test. AJ Wilcox I'm a huge fan of that level of organization. Thank you for sharing that. Okay, so I'm just taking notes. Here we have the A/B testing idea generation. Then once you've generated those ideas, you go and actually start implementing the creative. And then step three was analyzing your results. Sander de Lange Yes, exactly, exactly. So step three would be the optimization and analyze process after you've launched them. So if you gave them a good naming structure, it would be very easy to find the results per ads, and you can then check if the results are statistically significant. And pause the loser, keep the winner alive and try to make a new variant based on the winner. So you can try and beat it. And if you do that, you can go back to the library and see based on the winner if you can find any other ads that might help you with that. AJ Wilcox Beautiful, I absolutely love that. What I like to do is, all of my ads that I launch on a certain day, I'll actually put the date. And whether it's the A or the B version in the ad name. So in the ad platform, I can go and just type the date, and then all the ads I see will just be either an A or B, I can very quickly evaluate. I'm a bit of an Excel geek like I would rather get it out to excel and run it in a pivot table. But if it was simple, like there was only a few of them, that'd be really good to do right within the platform. So I love that recommendation. AJ Wilcox Here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive back into the interview with Sander. Unknown Speaker The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you be B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. AJ Wilcox If you're a B2B company and care about getting more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, then chances are LinkedIn Ads are for you. But the platform isn't easy to use, and can be painfully expensive on the front end. At B2linked, we've cracked the code to maximizing ROI while minimizing costs. Our methodology includes building and executing LinkedIn Ads strategies, customized to your unique needs, and tailored to the way that B2B consumers buy today. Over the last 11 years, we've worked with some of the largest LinkedIn advertisers in the world, we've spent over $150 million on the platform, and we're official LinkedIn partners. If you want to generate more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, book a discovery call at B2linked.com/apply. We'd absolutely love to get to work with you. All right, let's jump back into ad search.io. AJ Wilcox I'm curious, and I don't even know if you can share this, but where are you getting the data from on these? How does your software determine which company is important enough to index their ads? Sander de Lange In the beginning, we were looking at companies that have ads with a lot of engagement on them. But there's actually not that many companies that are doing a really great job on this. So we started to expand a little bit to add more ads in the tool so people can find lots of inspiration. And then we try to now adding more ads by companies that are doing a really good job. Based on the likes and the comments and the shares. Yep. AJ Wilcox Do you have any way of estimating how much a company is spending? And part of the competitive research would be looking at a competitor and trying to figure out like, are they spending $5k? Are they spending $300k a month? Can your tool do anything like that? Or do you have a rule of thumb that you might use to estimate how much I'm spending? Sander de Lange Yeah, as of right now, we don't have it yet. But we've definitely been thinking about if we could estimate or create a formula to estimate that that would be great. We do have some other cool ideas that might correspond with this a little bit. But as of right now, we didn't yet figure that one out. AJ Wilcox Do you have any thoughts on how we could use this tool for sales intelligence, I'm imagining if you're trying to sell into a certain company, or trying to sell into an industry, how you might use that to get a foot in the door. Sander de Lange Yeah, for sure, you can use our tool to find clients in specific regions and industries and company sizes. So you would know they are advertising on LinkedIn. You can already see the type of ads they are running. So what a sales team could do is that they could reach out and offer audits to a specific target industry. First of all, generate a list of qualified LinkedIn advertisers in that space. Currently, we have around 60,000 advertisers in the database, so there's probably going to be some qualified prospects in there. Yeah, and reach out to them offer ideas on how they should improve the advertising strategy, and see if you can offer them audit or free consult to develop a sales opportunity for the company. AJ Wilcox Very cool. I love that. What about competitive research? How would you go about using this? Let's say you're launching ads for a company, you want to research their competitors? How would you go about doing that? Sander de Lange That's a good one. Let's say you want to research one of your competitors. One of the things that our tool makes available is that you can actually find the ads that the most engaging ads your competitors are running. So that's one thing our tool can do that you can find on LinkedIn that easily yourself. So for example, if it's a big company, there might be 1000s of ads, they're running at every one time. And you can just go to our tool, type in the company name. Once you click on the company logo, there'll be view all ads by this company that will show you the ads they are running and then you can sort them by reactions like likes or sort them by comments. You can see these ads are the most engaging ones. And maybe also go through the comments that people leave on your competitors ads because that might be really valuable information as well. So based on that, you could see what's really working for them. AJ Wilcox And do you have to do all of this within the tool? Or is there like an export to Excel for us Excel junkies? Sander de Lange That might be a really good feature to add AJ, so you've given us a good idea. We have it on the back end, but maybe we should make the export available. AJ Wilcox Or at least to my account, because I would love to get some good use out of that. Sander de Lange Okay. I'll write that down AJ Wilcox I love getting big data into Excel. So I think the biggest question I think we're all going to have is, What does a subscription cost for those who aren't currently using it? Can you walk us through what pricing is like? Sander de Lange Yeah, sure. Currently, the pricing plans are per quarter or per year. So as of this point, they are $49 US dollars per quarter, or $99 per year. And that would include unlimited searches, unlimited filters, bookmarks, everything. There's no limitations on the plan. So I gotta be honest, here, we're not sure how long this is going to be that way. As of right now, that's the current pricing. AJ Wilcox Perfect. But that does feel really reasonable to me. I do hope everyone here who's listening who thinks this might be interesting, go and get subscribed, make sure you're grandfathered into any rate to before increases in the future. So love that. Are there any questions that you wish I would have asked you anything cool about the tool you want to point out? Or anything coming up on the roadmap that we should know about? Sander de Lange Yeah, I'd like to bounce a few ideas, that'd be great. Well, one of them is that we think we might have discovered a way to create also some insights into the targeting of a specific LinkedIn Ad campaign. So you could see, for example, what type of targeting your competitor might be using. But I'd like to see what would you think of that? Is that something that would be interesting to you? AJ Wilcox Oh, that would be so cool. To me. I mean, that takes your competitive intelligence, text that up to 11. Can you share with us how you'd narrow in on that? Or is that proprietary? Sander de Lange I gotta be a bit careful here. But what the end result would be, you know, LinkedIn recently released that feature where you can see like, okay, your audience, they have these types of skills, these type of job titles, these type of company sizes, all that type of stuff. AJ Wilcox Yeah, the audience insights feature. Sander de Lange The audience insights feature. We would be able to create something like this, but then for other companies, then your own for your competitors, that will be the end result. AJ Wilcox Oh, I love that. Okay, yeah. Sign me up. Whenever that happens. That'd be fantastic. Sander de Lange That's good to know. And maybe maybe we're also thinking of adding a few more ad channels in there, and maybe doing like a monthly curated, best LinkedIn Ads newsletter type of thing, you know, AJ Wilcox Oh, yeah! Because the LinkedIn reps, obviously, our team, when we're working on 50, 60 accounts a month, we always have a whole bevy of account reps. Sometimes we get put on their newsletters. And so I've got 20 emails a month from reps. But a lot of times what they do is they show like the top ads per month in that industry. And so if you had one that was always updated, you'd have to wait for it from a rep or ask your rep for it. That would be really cool. Sander de Lange Yes, yes, yes. Okay, then you've given me a lot of valuable feedback there. AJ Wilcox So I do have a question. That is, it's this is selfish of me, it's very much to our own strategy. But a lot of times, what we'll do is we'll build one ad per campaign, and we'll have a lot of campaigns, which means that if you actually looked at the ads on the company page, they would have very few likes, or very few comments. But if you aggregated them all together, by all the ads that looking at the same, there could be quite a few. Is there any way to combine similar ads in your tool? Or I'm imagining like a live pivot table, but something that's like, oh, this same image, the same ad text is found across 50 different ads? So we've aggregated them for you. Is there anything like that? Sander de Lange Yeah, I think if we would make like the Excel exports available, you would be able to do that. Yeah, if the introductory text or the headline matches, you'd be able to do that in Excel. So that could take the intelligence to a new level. So that's a good idea. AJ Wilcox Very nice. Okay. I like that I can do that. Cool. Well, I think the last question I want to ask you is, both professionally and personally, what are you most excited about? Sander de Lange I'm really excited about all the positive feedback we're getting on the tool. So developing it even further with new features is something that really excites us. And personally, I'm trying to see if I can keep doing this working remotely thing because in my country right now, it's wintertime, and I'd love to get some more sunshine in my life, you know, AJ Wilcox Oh, yeah. But I would imagine in Thailand, like your money goes a long way. And you can pretty much live like a king. Sander de Lange That's true also. So inflation and everything. This is a good move. AJ Wilcox And you're traveling right now with a baby, right? Sander de Lange Yeah. AJ Wilcox How was that? Is that difficult? Sander de Lange You're right the first time we have our daughter is now almost one year old. We've been here like 11 times before but this the first time with a baby and yeah, it's a bit different, but she's loving it here as well. I think it's definitely something we can keep doing. AJ Wilcox Oh, yeah. Where's the rest of your team? Is the rest of your team all within the Netherlands? Sander de Lange Yes, yes, they're based in the Netherlands. But ever since the pandemic, we've been getting used to more remote working, they are welcome to join me here if they want to, but they've got all their lives in the Netherlands. So sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. AJ Wilcox Cool. Curious, you're doing an agency, you're also running SAS software? Is that a split that you want to do forever? Or do you like one over the other? Sander de Lange Yeah, so I like both of them. But as you know, we're trying to get into more recurring business models. And it's just interesting for me to learn all of these models, I can also use that knowledge in the agency life, you know, growing a SAS company. But eventually, I think I'd like to make a decision there, because I noticed that running multiple projects requires two dilutes the focus. In the end, I'd like to make a decision there. AJ Wilcox Okay, I like it. Well, this has been fantastic having you on. Thanks so much for your openness, for giving me so many cool ideas. I am a user of your product, but I just found out about 10 extra ways to go and use it. So I would invite everyone go and join while costs are low. Because this is definitely one of those things I could see charging significantly more for and, and even charging more to agencies versus an in house person who might not use it as much. So lots of good growth possibilities. But you guys all heard it here first get in at $49 a quarter or $99 a year. Sander de Lange Yeah. Thanks, AJ. It's been awesome to be on. AJ Wilcox Thank you, Sander. We'll be excited to hear how things develop in the future. And we may have you back on to give us an update on the tool sometime. Sander de Lange Okay. Cool, AJ. AJ Wilcox I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around. Unknown Speaker Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. AJ Wilcox If you go down and look in the show notes below, you'll see a link to AdSearch.io, as well as a link to Sander's LinkedIn profile if you want to go and connect with him or follow him there. If you or anyone you know, is looking to learn more about LinkedIn Ads, look no further than the course that I did with LinkedIn Learning, all about LinkedIn Ads. It's by far the highest quality and the lowest cost course out there. So click on the link in the show notes for that. If this is your first time listening, welcome, and please do hit that subscribe button. But if this is not your first episode, please do rate and review the podcast in whatever podcast player you use. Especially those reviews. They help a lot. And it is the biggest favor that you can do me for enjoying the show. With any questions, suggestions, corrections, and anything like that on the podcast, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives!

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Jonloomer.com Jon's TikTok Jon's Podcast Jon Loomer on LinkedIn NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Youtube Channel Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review!   Show Transcript Today we're diving heavily into Facebook Ads. Have I gone crazy? No, but I have Jon Loomer, and that's 1000 times better 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! Very early days when I was starting B2Linked, I came across Jon Loomer, who was the first Facebook Aads expert that I ever found. He provided the model and inspiration around a lot of what I built B2Linked into. Since then, he's built a veritable empire. Podcast, coaching, courses, joint venture partnerships, and he did it all with a focus on being able to spend time with his family. If it feels like I'm fanboying a little bit, it's definitely because I am. I've talked to a lot of you listeners who are also responsible for Facebook Ads. And so I invited John on the show. Generally, whatever we see as being successful in Facebook Ads eventually makes its way into LinkedIn Ads within about fourish years, so I thought the info he shares could be precious for us. He also shares strategies on how we can combine efforts between LinkedIn and Facebook, as well as shares valuable info for us on TikTok Ads. I'm very pleased to share this interview with you with Jon Loomer. Let's hit it. AJ Wilcox Everyone, I'm so excited to have Jon Loomer here with us. Jon, thanks so much for coming. Jon's a Facebook Ads educator, business owner, and just generally a great guy. Jon, welcome to the show. So excited to have you here. Jon Loomer Oh, man, I'm excited to be here, AJ. Thanks so much. AJ Wilcox Oh, you bet. Let's start right into the questions because I know we're gonna have a lot. First, tell me about your story. Tell me where you came from. business wise, I'm really interested in what you've done with your personal brand, how you decided, like, where and how to focus on Facebook Ads in digital marketing, tell us all that stuff. Jon Loomer There's really a long story and not quite as long story. It's difficult not to be long either way. But I've had this this business for 11 years now. And prior to that I had no experience starting a business. I didn't really even consider myself a marketer, even though the last job I was laid off from was VP of strategic marketing. It's a whole other story of like, I didn't think I was even qualified when I applied, but I worked for the NBA originally back 2005-2008. And that's a whole other episode, we could talk about that probably because there's a lot of fun stories from that. I mean, I oversaw fantasy games, which is the most ridiculous job ever. It was the greatest. But we lived in New Jersey, we had to move from Colorado to New Jersey. So I did make some concessions with my wife, they're like, okay, this will be a temporary thing. Back then you couldn't really work remotely. And I begged and begged and begged. And then that was it. So after that I was laid off a couple of times. Lots of nice things about the NBA job, one of the things was I was exposed to Facebook for the first time in 2007. That's when there are 50 million people on the platform, they were just opening it up to the older folks. So anyone who was in high school and college. We partnered with Facebook to create an app before you could create your own app. And that was a first admin of the official NBA Facebook group before there were pages. That's just how long ago that was. But I fell in love with the platform at the time. As a kid I moved around a lot, so to be able to reconnect with people that I thought I would never see hear from again was like so amazing. But I was also using it from a business perspective very, very early. I got laid off for a second time in 2011. One thing I knew was I couldn't move my family again, because we just went through that whole madness. I was also very spoiled in terms of the jobs I had just had. It's funny because I think everyone should do something that they do not enjoy as well. So I was an insurance underwriter for five years prior to the NBA job, and it provided some really good perspective. If you're an underwriter, I'm sure you love it. It's great. I didn't enjoy it. But that's part of why I got into the whole fantasy game stuff in the first place. And why ended up working for the NBA. Anyway. So the experience I had though, specifically around Facebook was really important. I started using that when I was at American Cancer Society after the NBA job. So once I was laid off, okay, one of the first things I did was I started a website. And again, one of the tools I kind of learned at really American Cancer Society during that time, was to create a WordPress website. And I just started writing because I had nothing better to do besides look for jobs, and I use the website basically as a way to show what I could do with the stuff I knew, hoping it would help me find a job. And every once in a while something would really hit and the topics were kind of broad, but they're all social media-ish. Eventually social media marketing specific and then probably six months after that started, I started to see the Facebook marketing is where I needed to focus. When that's really started to take off consistently, and I started to run ads. Now I had no money because we were just bleeding through cash at this point, bleed through savings because I didn't have a job. I was making a little bit of money from like affiliate marketing, and like ads on the site stuff because I started to get some traffic and that started to improve. But I started to run ads, and even in the very beginning, I was running like $1 a day and back then you can make an impact at $1 a day. And my main goal back then was just like building my audience, too. So as I was running ads, you know, that gave me something to write about. So I started reading more and more about Facebook Ads and start getting more confident. And power editor was the big thing for if you want it to be advanced, but no one knew how it worked. It was really complicated and buggy and confusing, which is perfect if you want to get attention for something. So I started writing about that. And my first course was on Power Editor. And that just exploded since 2012ish that I've focused almost entirely on Facebook advertising. That's been my niche. But again, I no background is starting a business, I didn't even realize I was a marketer until I applied for that VP of strategic marketing job. And it's been quite a journey, because with over 11 years, there's a lot of ups and downs and everything in between. AJ Wilcox But I have to tell you, the first exposure I had to you was I was using Power Editor. I came from the world of Google AdWords, Google Ads now. And I love the Google Ads Editor functionality of using spreadsheets to upload things. Of course, Power Editor was the first thing I jumped into when I got into Facebook. And I went and read a bunch of your stuff. So anyway, thank you many, many years ago for helping me through the Power Editor stuff. It was a cool first focus. So focusing on more of the recent, what are some of the most exciting developments in Facebook Ads? Jon Loomer Well, first of all, it's become a much bigger challenge, right? So you have the good old days when, if you're advertising, you were one of the few. And if you knew what you're doing, you're one of the exclusive group. And you could have a ton of success for not a lot of money. And then more and more advertisers joined in, and it got more and more expensive just to reach people. And I think the biggest change, though, over the last couple of years was iOS 14 opt outs and everything that happened there. And the result of that was more than anything drop in conversion results. So whether or not your advertising actually was less less effective. What's funny is it may have been fine. But Facebook was not connecting conversions to your ads, which clients really want to see, typically. They're not gonna say, oh, yeah, we trust that that was actually working. It's funny because it went from the complaint that Facebook's Ad reporting was inflated to now there's a scramble, like, I gotta find these conversions and get credit for these conversions. Where are they? So that was just a really difficult, you know, year and a half or so. But the biggest developments over the last, you know, month or two months in it, not everybody has these things yet, but Facebook is starting to bring some of these things back. And so one of the biggest things is, and I still contend that opt outs, end of the day probably didn't really impact our results much. I think the biggest impact was losing 28 Day click attribution. So that's where, you know, a lot of people would claim that the reporting was inflated, because it's like, oh, well, why is it I get credit for this. If someone clicked on an ad and then converted 28 days later, right? Sure, you can make the argument that one day click is more relevant than 28 Day click, but the truth is, they still originally clicked on your ad and then ended up converting so getting that credit was good, especially if you had a more expensive product, anything that took more of a commitment. And it's not just that oh yet, that's a nice shirt, I'm gonna buy that losing 28 Day click and going just a seven day click one day view hurt a lot of advertisers and brands because they lost that reporting that is coming back. Now it's not the default reporting. So that's still seven day click one day view. But if you have this, you would cut the go into your columns drop down. And there's an option to compare attribution, which is another thing that went away since the iOS and then came back, which is really important for other reasons too. You can then add columns to your report to break down your conversions that are within one day view, one day click, seven day click, and now on 28 day click. It's really interesting because even though your default reporting may show you've got 20 conversions, if you add those columns, you may see another three or five conversions to happen outside of that seven day click attribution window. And that's really helpful with showing Yes, I made an impact that completely changed the perspective of your advertising. Those two things that compare attribution, 28 day click attribution being available, and also the ability to break down conversions by things like placement, and geography was something that went away with iOS. That's coming back as well. AJ Wilcox Wow. So what do you think the overall impact from the iOS 14 update is going to be for Facebook? It sounds like they had to get rid of some things. And then now they're bringing them back. Do you see we just have less data? Is it coming back in full force? Jon Loomer I only have theories on this, because I haven't heard anything official from Facebook. But it seems to me first of all, they got rid of those things out of abundance of caution. Yeah. Because because they were caught flat footed. This is one of the few times they were not in control, they were reacting to something that Apple was forcing them to do. And I don't think they knew what the full impact of it would be. Because reality is like looking back, I don't really understand why they got rid of those things. Let's just say that any of the iOS opt out conversion data, if that became less reliable, fine. But not all conversions happen on an iOS device, and maybe the people opted in. So the point is, like, they threw away all this stuff, just because of iOS. Because yeah, I get it that if you opt out of tracking, anything beyond seven day click is probably not reliable for those people, right. So we throw away all those conversions that came from Android device, that came from desktop, you know, like, that just doesn't even make sense. So even if that's incomplete data now, I think that's data that advertisers would be very happy to have it back. So yeah, I think they probably overreacted. I don't know the full background of why did it. But I know that things like modeling improved, because originally, when the changes were made, it was just seven day click attribution, or seven day click optimization, by default, they got rid of even the view through, which was big. And then eventually even they said, the modeling improves, they change the seven day click one day view, My bet is part of this just has to do with the modeling improving, that they brought it back, because the question has to be asked, right? It's like, the issues facing advertisers, for the future aren't just about iOS. It's about you know, browsers, it's about other devices. It's about any of these companies deciding we're going to prevent you from tracking going forward, they could decide to do that. So why would Facebook put in the effort of bringing these things back, unless they were confident that they'd be able to continue to go that direction? So my bet is because of the modeling, or whatever it is, they've got to make that data reliable. We're heading in that direction. And maybe this is just a guess no one's ever said this. But maybe 28 Day click one day view optimization is coming back. I mean, it would only make sense if they've got that data, and they're gonna show it to us, right? I think that would be pretty awesome. AJ Wilcox When they've had enough time now to check their models, they can check their models against reality and fine tune them. I think, once they have high confidence, they bring them back, and then adjust the optimizations for them. That makes perfect sense. Jon Loomer Right. So it's getting better, it's getting better. AJ Wilcox What about modelled conversions?Does Facebook do this? I know Google did eight years ago or something where they had the standard conversions column be one that was based off of models, and it wasn't the actual conversions that occurred. People had a little uproar about that, then I think it's still available. But I've been honestly, I've been out of Google Ads for a long time. Does Facebook have that same sort of thing? Like, do they have a modeled conversion? Do they try to push it on advertisers? Or is it very much like it does the conversion pixel and conversion API kind of rule there? Jon Loomer The data includes model conversions. So there's not broken out, there's indication when metrics are in exact, based on modeling based on, you know, having other factors contributing. But beyond that, I think the closest that that Facebook attribution tool that used to allow for different modeling and different windows, they got rid of that. Again, went away with all the iOS stuff, I assume, because became less confident in that type of data. But I don't recall there ever really been an uproar over that maybe we were about to create that AJ. AJ Wilcox And I know LinkedIn has talked about modeling conversion data. If their conversion data becomes less accurate. I would be personally offended if I ever reported to a client Oh, you got seven conversions and then they looked in there CRM and said we only see three here, like, what are you talking about? I look like a liar, like model of conversions is feels like an affront to me it feels dishonest to report to a client. Jon Loomer Understood. Just generally, that's a battle for advertisers overall like getting data to match up. And oftentimes it's a misunderstanding of the data, or they've set up the pixel wrong or something. I don't think that typically the issue is actually with modelled data that it's off. We could go down a whole rabbit hole on this, but like, for example, you could have a results column for conversions, right. And you're optimizing for conversion promoting the sale of a specific product. Facebook reports 200 conversions, you're showing 100 sales of that product. The reality is those conversions include other conversions too that happen while they're on your site during that time. And if you hover over there, you can actually see the breakdown of all those conversions. But things like that create confusion. It goes years back that why does this not match up to Google Analytics? And the reality is Facebook has data too that Google Analytics does not, like views through especially like Google is never going to get the views through stuff. Obviously, if Facebook says you've got 10 purchases, and on the back end, you know that you've only sold eight. And you're not talking about oh, what has came from Facebook or not? Because that's a whole other story, too, is like you can't rely on data that says referred from Facebook. But if you know, eight total sales compared to 10, report it, that's a problem. Usually, though, where I start with that is less blaming it on Facebook and did we set this up? I'd ook at that first? AJ Wilcox Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. All right, well spend some time there. But boy, I just don't like the idea of modeled conversions. Like, show me exactly what I actually had don't predict what I should have had given. Obviously, the majority of our listeners are in B2B. I'm really curious, like, what are some of the most effective things in B2B advertising on Facebook, especially now, Jon Loomer It really depends on that service that you're offering. But more than anything, whether it's advertising or not, video. You know, having some sort of video strategy to raise awareness for your brand, raise authority, whatever it is that you need to build for that B2B relationship, depending on what kind of product you have for them. We can't just rely on the links these days, and then clicking on those links and go into your website. And this has been a big adjustment for me too, because for the longest time, I am a data guy. I'm a stats guy. And like, I know that business happens on my website, and my website, my email list are central to everything working. So I've long contended that, like, I can promote blog posts, that's fine, right? I can track that goes to my website, even though that doesn't sell anything I can then see okay, what do people do on my website, once they've been referred on blog posts, the problem becomes like getting marketers, I think this is definitely the case for B2B too. To using video is like you don't always have something to sell, you shouldn't always be selling something with video. And you shouldn't always have a link to go to your website. And that sounds crazy. And I know, to some old school marketers, because I was that guy, probably just a few months ago said, Why would you do that? First of all, it's playing the game. I've never been big on playing the game. But I haven't played the game and so long and my business suffered from it. So fewer and fewer people were seeing in a news feed because I was not using video. Now suddenly, I'm using video. And once you know it, everybody, I'm getting so many comments every day. Jon, I haven't seen you in years. Where have you been? You know, so video with the right frame of mind when you create these like creating video for value, to provide value and be seen as someone you should go to or a brand you should go to for assistance, because that's often the B2B relationship, right? Where you may not need them at that moment. But they're seen as an authority, and you trust them and you consume their content once you need them, you will go to them. And that's kind of the importance of video. AJ Wilcox So what do you think the reason for this is? Do you feel like Facebook has gone all in, like doubling down on promoting the video inventory? Or do you feel like users consume it more? And so Facebook feeds it more to their users? What do you see driving this trend? Jon Loomer This has long been the question on Facebook, because we can go back to other formats as well. Like when we talked about the algorithm and you know what benefits and what doesn't? Is it Facebook, favoring a certain format because people are engaging with it more, or people engaging with it more because the algorithm is favoring it, showing them that content? I think it's a combination of those things. But obviously, it's it'd be foolish to push video if people didn't want to see video. You know, the funny thing, I'm going to go on a tangent here just for a second. Remember the days when an auto play video came out? And the uproar, like, how do I turn this off? This is gonna be a huge failure. What is Facebook doing? That's pretty much every app right now is autoplay video. So point being that was pushed, was it because Facebook knew it would be successful? Because man, there was a lot of negative pushback to that. My bet is though they saw regardless of what people said, how they consumed it, that's often like as a marketer, I think that's an important lesson, generally. I don't listen to polls, when they ask what apps do you use the most? Facebook or not? And then oh, look, that this group of people is no longer using Facebook, they're abandoning and Facebook. And then you look at data and it shows something completely different. So anyway, I think this is kind of an example of that. But anyway, I do think there's something to video being so incredibly engaging. I mean, like Facebook is also reacting to TikTok, obviously. Instagram, they kind of went that direction, first with Instagram, trying to mimic TikTok. And now we're carrying that those rules over to Facebook as well, I can tell you firsthand, if you're just promoting links, if you're just sharing links, you're not gonna get the distribution that other companies other brands get from using video. And again, I understand you want to drive traffic to your websites or like, if that's the only metric you're looking at is traffic, then you might not see the benefit of this. But if you're playing the long game on this, if you want to create a connection with your potential customer, Video is just as the way to go right now. AJ Wilcox Oh, I love this. I've seen something similar on LinkedIn, where if you would have asked me a year ago about LinkedIn's, video ads, I would have told you avoid them, they are on average, about 20% more expensive per click than single image ads. Just don't do it, like people don't go to LinkedIn to be entertained, so they're not gonna stick around for your video. But in just the last six months, we've seen some video ads now starting to outperform a single image. And that doesn't tell me that LinkedIn changed their algorithm or anything like that. It tells me that user behavior is changing. People are actually coming back to LinkedIn to spend time and consume rather than just come because they had a connection request, check it, answer a message or two. Jon Loomer Yeah, and I think it's challenging. And it's not that you can't drive traffic with video. It's just always gonna be a secondary thing, especially at TikTok, I mean, anyone who's used TikTok clicks to a website from the TiKTok app, or it's such a roundabout thing. Like if you put a link in there, in like comments or anything, it's not even clickable. So they always say, oh, click the link in my profile kind of thing. That's like, the most roundabout way, because they want to keep you on the app. So like, as marketers, I understand that that's like, you have this block that says, this is wrong? Why would we want to do that? But I have some stories here. So I've been doing this for a couple of months. And beyond just having people say, oh, John, I haven't seen you my newsfeed forever, you helped me back in 2014, which makes me feel old. But at the same time, beyond seeing that a lot, all of a sudden, I had one on ones, two one on ones on Monday and Tuesday, but all four of them told me that they were there, because they started seeing my videos. And there are people who signed up for my membership, same thing, and I started telling the stories, like, yes, I am here because of those videos. I was not able to connect that in any way, with metrics, anything to show me that that was the truth. My traffic's not even like, crazy, like anything spiked or anything because of this. It's just because of that connection, that emotional connection you can create. But these people are human, I trust this person. It's not even like there's a specific video or anything that you can point to. It's like, it's the collection of the effort that led to it. And as you can see, it's kind of changed my business. And I just want to screen it so people understand it. AJ Wilcox And that's so funny for data guys like you and I because if you look in your analytics platforms, you're not going to see this. And so totally difficult to say because I think we expect sequence, we expect a funnel to show us that something's working. And in your case, like you've shared with us very specifically like the end of the funnel grew, and you see nothing in between to tell you that it's working. That's pretty crazy. Jon Loomer And it has to be the word of mouth. It has to be the people who tell me that if they don't tell me that, I'm just guessing. I have no idea if that actually contributed. So that's the hard part about what we do. AJ Wilcox Yeah, it's true. What we started doing we started asking in a free form field in Our forms when people apply, how did you hear about us? And of course, we're capturing UTM parameters. So we know what platform sent them. But it's really interesting to compare when someone says, Oh, I saw you on YouTube, but their link came from a LinkedIn Ad. And we're like, going, okay, like we're seeing where other platforms are contributing kind of cool. Alright, so I'm imagining the majority of our listeners there are responsible for LinkedIn, obviously, like, why would you listen to LinkedIn Ads Show if you weren't responsible for LinkedIn, but you're probably also responsible for Facebook as well? What would you suggest to advertisers who are responsible for both LinkedIn and Facebook? How do you make the platforms be synergistic, add to each other, work together in harmony? Like, do you have any tips, tricks, strategies? Jon Loomer I think in all cases, every platform has strength. And every platform has its weakness. I think the biggest weakness for Facebook, especially B2B is sorting out your targeting audience. Particularly if you're not optimizing for a purchase or conversion at the time, if you're like, if you're trying to build awareness about your brand, you're going to be reaching all kinds of people in every field whatsoever, like, you could try using their interest targeting and whatnot, especially if you're optimizing for something like engagement, video views, traffic, anything like that, it's usually a mess. Whereas LinkedIn, you can use that specifically to reach people, especially in the B2B situation, who are there for business. Right? So whether it's by their job title or their industry, I think I would consider and look, I'm not a big LinkedIn Ads guy, but I will consider you can correct me on this, that from an awareness perspective, reaching the right people has to be much easier on LinkedIn, than on Facebook for that B2B situation. Right. And then if you're able to drive them to your website at some point, with something, that's where Facebook becomes a little bit better. Piggybacking off of LinkedIn, like off using the comparison with with Google Ads, right? For whatever reason, Facebook's never come up with a reliable search ad, they've experimented a couple of times with different types of search ads. But if you are a business that is only needed when someone needs you, alright, so I don't know why I was using the plumber, but like a plumber. You're not going to follow a plumber on social media, right? And just blanketly targeting everybody. I mean, you can build your brand, but you're probably spent a ton of money just telling people, you're a plumber. So those types of ads on Facebook are difficult. Whereas on Google, you can attract people who are looking for that solution. And then on Facebook, you can remarket to those people who were driven by the Google Ad. So Facebook is ideal, first of all, for Ecom, I would say. So if you're selling product, and you've got a category of product that Facebook knows well, you can optimize for that and do great going broad what not, you don't even really need to actually just put out a blog post on it. That's really where Facebook thrives. And the remarketing, good as well. But the weaknesses in Facebook would be, especially in a B2B situation, attracting the right people at the surface level, top of the funnel, but also the whole reach people before they need you situation. AJ Wilcox I love that. We talked about in our news section a couple episodes ago about how Facebook released the newer B2B targeting and there's five segments. It's interesting, because when I'm used to going into LinkedIn and typing, here are the job titles I want to target, for instance, Facebook used to offer that then took it away. Now we have like, oh, here's this one segment that is we think this is business decision. This is everyone probably manager and above whose job is anything from accounting to sales? It's kind of interesting that they would put it into buckets. Do you see Facebook doing much more? Is this just a foray into it? And then they'll give us more specific targeting later? Jon Loomer It's funny, you mentioned that example. Because it's one of those things was like, oh, yeah, they did this. And I completely forgot. I don't see it as being very valuable. And maybe it is valuable to some of the people who have used it, I've seen value in it. But it's also kind of going against the direction Facebook's heading with targeting. And that direction is like, just go broad. And let the algorithm work. So unless you have something specific, like I need to reach people with this certain job title, a lot of that kind of broad business decision maker stuff, I don't know how effective that's really going to be. Yeah, if someone's had crazy success with it, feel free to correct me on that. AJ Wilcox Cool. Well, I'm excited to try it out. We're certainly exploring anything. I love LinkedIn Ads, but not because the platform is something magic. It's because of access to the right audience. So If there's any other platform out there, that's going to give me control over B2B. I'm going to adopt it, I'm going to accept it. AJ Wilcox So here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into advanced Facebook Ads strategy, as well as the new hotness of TikTok. The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. AJ Wilcox If you're a B2B company and care about getting more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, then chances are LinkedIn Ads are for you. But the platform isn't easy to use, and can be painfully expensive on the front end. At B2Linked, we've cracked the code to maximizing ROI, while minimizing costs. Our methodology includes building and executing LinkedIn Ad strategies, customized to your unique needs, and tailored to the way B2B consumers buy today. Over the last 11 years, we've worked with some of the largest LinkedIn advertisers in the world, we've spent over $150 million on the platform, and we're official LinkedIn partners. If you want to generate more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, book a discovery call today at B2Linked.com/apply. We'd absolutely love the chance to get to work with you. All right, let's jump back into the interview with Jon Loomer. AJ Wilcox Alright, so I've got to ask, are there any no brainer things that we should be doing with Facebook Ads? Obviously, the platform changes a lot and is constantly adding new stuff. Is there anything no brainer that we might have missed? Jon Loomer I feel like we've talked about the latest developments. For me like the biggest thing, if you've got 28 Day click, you have to dig in search and find it and uncover it. And that's a no brainer, like, show me that more conversions happen, that's really important. The other thing is, if you're running an ad for purchases, I strongly advise that you experiment with going completely broad. Which sounds crazy, I am someone who for years, I just loved a micro targeting. Like target the most relevant people, it could be the smallest audiences, people are most engaged with my stuff. And it's not that you shouldn't ever do that anymore. But I think what we've seen is Facebook's really, really good when it comes to sales. We kind of mentioned that before the algorithm doing things in real time that you can't, or it takes too long to do, to figure it out, and you're going to waste money. So not even bothering with lookalike audiences and interests just going completely broad for Ecom. And when you're when you're selling a product, beyond that, like Facebook ads, I think any advertising platform is so much of an experimental thing, right? I have never had to tell you always do this, this is one thing, because it's it always works. Should you use broad targeting? Should you use narrow? Should you use these certain optimizations? It all depends. So many factors impact the success or lack thereof of your ads. The fact that I'm even telling you consider broad targeting is because I've eventually gotten over my objections to it. Unless you try things you'll never know what actually does, it doesn't work. So I would experiment like crazy if you can. AJ Wilcox I'm with you. I think that would be really uncomfortable for me if LinkedIn ever said just go all broad, we'll find your right people be. It would be really hard for me to trust. I would also wonder like, what is the learning period? Like how long do I give a test before I give up and go? Nope, it had its chance. I mean, I pulled my budget back? Jon Loomer Well, so a couple things with the concept of broad targeting, and then the learning, right? So the truth is that no matter what we do right now, that's the direction Facebook's going. Because if you target an interest, a group of interests, and you're optimizing for any type of conversion, advantage detailed targeting is automatically turned on. That's their expansion product for detailed targeting. So that gives Facebook the ability to go as broad as they want to go beyond what you said you wanted to target to get you the results that they think they can get you. So same thing with look alike audiences, advantage look alike audiences, which is look like expansion, is automatically on for conversions. So if you say, oh, I only target this 1%, they can go to 10% if they want to get you more conversions. So I don't know if everybody knows that. That's the direction it's going anyway. But in terms of the learning period, that's also where we should be careful because that first seven days is Facebook's learning phase. And that's when you'll even see in that delivery column that learning your results are going to be less stable during that time. Additionally, I would be wary of making any changes or drastic changes like stopping anything based on the most recent three days, especially if you've got a lot of people in your audience who are on iOS devices, because there can be a delay in some of that reporting for privacy reasons. So you can't connect the dots or Facebook can't, I don't even know who abuses this so why this is necessary? That reporting can be delayed, which is also why we go back and look at reporting, like, wow, that went up, how'd that change, it's because of that delayed reporting. So don't make any drastic decisions within the most recent three days. But also, if you can let it get through the learning phase. So that's where the algorithm is learning about what works and what doesn't work and trying to get you the best results, the most efficient results. Once you get through the learning phase, that's pretty much when, okay, this is the best rate you're gonna get probably it might fluctuate a little bit over time. But if it's still not working, once you get through the learning phase, yeah, shut it off. AJ Wilcox Okay. So seven day learning phase, if you turn something on, like ultra broad targeting, I have seen some ads reach saturation, before seven days. What do you do about that? Like, if you want to make sure you have seven days, but your ads are reaching high frequency in that time, which would normally tell me to trigger a refresh? How do you balance that? Jon Loomer So it's all about what is my cost per desired action? Right? So audience saturation is something that I don't think most people even realize how to access that data. So you'd select your ad set and on the right hand, part of ads manager, there's an icon, it's like a magnifying glass, the Inspect tool. You click on that, and within there, there's a bunch of charts and graphs, and one of them is for audience saturation. And there are four different metrics related to audience saturation. So I'm going to remember all unfortunately. One is frequency, one is reach, one of them is first time impression ratio. And there's one more. So basically, you can compare it to your cost per conversion. So essentially, yeah, you might see that the frequency is going up, the reach is flattening out. The first time impression ratio went from up top to way down at the bottom. You might see all those things. But if that is not coinciding with an increase in cost per conversion, then who cares? Right? If those two things are connected, that's when you make that decision. So that's why you know, when people often ask, you know, what's that saturation rate or that frequency when you shut it off? That misses the point, if you're getting good results? Who cares what that is? AJ Wilcox Yeah. And it's at the point that you see those results stop that you go and measure that up with against saturation. That makes perfect sense. So since Facebook is kind of old news, Now, tell me what you think might be the most interesting right now in the world of digital marketing? Jon Loomer Oh, well, I'm suddenly dipping into TikTok. So not just from a organic point of view, but I'm using it for advertising as well. So if you've run any Facebook ads before, the first thing you'll notice if you've ever jumped into Tiktok Ads is it looks exactly like Facebook Ads. I haven't heard this specifically mentioned, but I'd be shocked if it's not true that TikTok's engineering team is made up of former Facebook engineers. I'm sure they are. Yeah, because not only is it just set up the same, it's called TikTok Ads manager. Like any of the terminology you're used to is all used there. Custom audiences and look alike audiences and breakdowns and they just came out with an audience Insights tool that is just like the old Facebook audience insights tool, which was really valuable before they scrapped it because of privacy concerns. But everything just works the same. Now, obviously, the platform and the format's different. So your results and kind of your overall strategy could be different. But that's the biggest thing for me is like jumping into that it kind of opened up a new world of wow, I feel really comfortable here. Our marketing world is that's just scratching the surface of like, the kind of as we're talking, you need to get involved in short form video in some way. If you're not comfortable with TikTok, that's fine. The nice thing and really the primary reason I got into TikTok, even though I like laughed about it in a joke probably three months ago, was if it was a unique format that you couldn't apply anywhere else, I'd probably never would have gotten into it. But you could take that and take that same file. Like you probably don't want to take the TikTok version with a TikTok watermark. I mean, I do all my recording and editing off of TikTok, which may or may not be the wrong way to go. But by doing that I can upload to TikTokand add TikTok music. Again, upload two reels and add reels music on Facebook and Instagram. I can upload to YouTube shorts and then you've probably know this, I've created a square version, I just throw it on a square Canvas for LinkedIn. And so the benefit of that is like, you know, even if your TikTok efforts are flat or just not leading to huge results, it's like you've got all these other platforms you can apply that to. And this isn't just like a matter of cross posting, because the way I kind of manage each of those is different. Like ever seen any of my LinkedIn videos, like I provide a lot of long form thoughts, in addition to the video that I wouldn't provide those other places. It's led to all these people on Facebook and Instagram ike I didn't really didn't use Instagram before doing this. I use it as a placement to reach people with my Facebook Ads. And that was about it. It took me a long time to even get into sharing photos. Like, I just didn't even want to do that. And again, that kind of goes back to the whole my objections to photo sharing, I need to drive people to my website, which is why I wouldn't even use Instagram. But anyway, applying that to these different platforms. And then all of a sudden, you can get that aggregate lift, which I think I'm seeing right now. I mean, that's the biggest change right now in marketing is, if you're not getting involved in this, I worry for you. I think it's important. AJ Wilcox That's good advice. By the way, LinkedIn now accepts a native square video for their posts. So you may use the same canvases you're already using for others. Jon Loomer So if I use the nine by 16, what will happen? AJ Wilcox Is it vertical? Jon Loomer So I'm using the vertical, I use that for TikTok and reels and shorts. I throw it on a square canvas, I don't have to change the video in any way and I don't have to crop anything out or anything. So then I have my colors or whatever in the background and the sides. So then it's square. I don't think that uploading the tall works on LinkedIn does it? AJ Wilcox So it does now in the ad platform, I just don't know about organically. Okay. All right. What's interesting is they tell us that if we upload vertical video, it will serve but it will only serve to mobile devices. But that's one of the only controls we have for what devices LinkedIn Ads show up on. I sure would like it the other way around, I'd love to be able to say this format only shows on desktop, but whatever. Yeah, I don't know about organic. We've had some questions about that and I haven't had a chance to test it out. Maybe test it out and let us know, Jon Loomer When I started doing this was square is the ideal on LinkedIn for organic, which is why I did it. And I tried to do in a way that's not going to create a bunch of extra work by just okay, I've got this created video with all the captioning on it, just throw it on a square canvas. And it looks I think, fine. As opposed to trying to recreate the square dimensions, AJ Wilcox We do find over and over that square outperforms every other format for both image and video. So yeah, cool. I think you're on the right path. What are some of the things that marketers should be using TikTok for? Jon Loomer First of all, in your brand, right, so and what your goals are, at minimum, t's just about creating connection with a potential customer, right. So if you have a service, where you are an expert is supposed to be an expert in where they can hire you to do something, you should be mostly about educating them on that thing. And I know for years, the argument against doing something like that was like, oh, but then they'll just do it themselves. I think it's the complete opposite of that, like, yes, they might take bits and pieces of that. But eventually, they need an expert. And because you establish that expertise over and over and over and over again, they'll go to you when they need that help to hire you or recommend you or whatever it be. So I think if you're a service, just sharing your expertise on a regular basis, no strings attached. Like, again, I know this is an obstacle for a lot of brands of constantly pushing selling this this product product product, I would avoid that as much as you can, or you still get mostly ignored. So there's that. But you can also do things like you know, product specific how people use your product. If you're like more of a like a retail, or then it's less about establishing any kind of expertise, it could be more lifestyle, how people are using it, just fun, entertaining videos related to your product. There's just a lot of different angles you can take. The ultimate bottom line though, is you can't be 100% buy my stuff. It's gonna stand out in a bad way. You gotta be thinking, first of all, how do I grab their attention? How do I provide value? How do I you know, make their thumb stop? That's the goal. AJ Wilcox Oh, that's perfect.What about for B2B? Have you found anyone who's done a good job in B2B on TikTok? Any tips for us who are in B2B? Jon Loomer So the stuff I've been following, unfortunately, I can't even think of names. They're just like faces that show up in that tic tac feed. But a lot of that stuff that I follow is B2B. It's people who are experts in a field and I apply a lot of what I learned there to what I do, it's just a lot of educating. So this is how you do something in this field, and this my expertise, and do it quickly. Right. That's the other difficult adjustment for me and I'm sure a lot of old school marketers is like, get to the freaking point, fast. So not only get their attention, but also get to the point fast, they're ready to move that next video. So you've got to provide some value, solve a problem. So think about what are the problems that your target audience have focused on something very specific, wrap that up in a minute or less, I mean, it could be 10 seconds. There could be something so specific that you can get out in 10 seconds. And man, I wish I could give you some specific names. There's several of them who are just really good at the how to. So it's list the top three things you should be doing blah, blah, blah, or why this one thing is so important. It's those types of things. But I encourage anyone who's on TikTok or reels, start following people based on these keywords, engage with the stuff that you like, oh, that's really useful, follow them. And you will start seeing your feed catered to that. There's this there for you section of TikTok, for example, we're constantly seeing more B2B type of content there that I find really useful and t's based on my own engagement. AJ Wilcox Very cool, great tips. Thanks for sharing that. What about you, either professionally, or personally? Or both? What are you most excited about right now? Jon Loomer Man, I tell you, this is a different part of my life. So personally, I have three sons, my business I built around being able to spend as much time with them as possible. And we shared a common love for baseball. So everything I've done really over the first 10, 11 years is about making sure, first of all that I had a business I had an income, I also had freedom of time to dedicate to coaching. Well, my two oldest boys are now in college. It's crazy. And my youngest is now in high school. So my coaching days are over, which is probably good timing. Because after a while, when you take that approach of like, I just want to be as free as possible and work less in this industry, you start getting left behind and that it was I think my business needed a reboot. So I'm spending way more time on my business right now. Because I have more free time that used to be taken up with coaching, building the business. And I think that's really why I'm doing all this video right now. I'm so energized in that. I said no to all podcast guest invitations for years. Because that's just one more thing that takes up my time that I didn't have time for. So it's these kinds of things like, you know, building these relationships and having these experiences I'm really excited about. AJ Wilcox I'm so grateful that you accepted this one. This is awesome. Like I will have mentioned in the intro, you've been a huge inspiration to me so thanks so much for coming on. Jon Loomer Thanks so much. AJ Wilcox I'm curious because you've dedicated so much time to coaching in baseball. Yeah, you've got some sons in college. Do you have any future MLB players? Or are they on scholarship? Or have they kind of left it behind? Jon Loomer No. So I feel really lucky for this. I mean, first of all, my oldest, he'll agree with this, the least skilled of the three. He played through varsity, which is no easy feat. 2500 kids in the school to play all the way through senior year. But he had a specific goal, like he's, he's a senior at Texas Tech right now. He's gonna go to med school next year. He's going to be an orthopedic surgeon is what he's planning on. And then my middle son, it's funny because like, he's one we're like, we kind of wanted him to keep playing. Because he's got that ability. I'm not gonna go MLB be or anything. But he's got that ability to play. But actually, it's probably a good thing that he's decided that's it, I'm ready to focus on school. Because that's what they are worried about with these kids, like in this environment that I'm in with baseball, it's so crazy, and so much pressure. It's constantly about getting to that next level. Like when you have that focus, are they prepared for when that's not an option anymore? Like, what are you going to do? And so he's actually planning on doing something in sports, he's looking to go into sports journalism, and he's super busy and active in college and I'm really proud of them. And our youngest son not gonna make any predictions on him. He's still living the dream play baseball in high school, but I think just as a parent, it's just a reminder that there's always something after and to make sure they're ready for that. That baseball sports really, unless, maybe not even unless, you can't make it the number one priority because eventually you're not going to have it. So yeah, that's one of those tough parenting lessons. AJ Wilcox Well, that is nice, because you see Olympians who go and get a gold medal and retire from their sport, and then they have a crash. They have a hard time figuring out what do I do with my life? I'm really glad that the sport takes them so far, but then they're willing to become well rounded and jump into school. I think that's a nod to your parenting that you're probably doing things right. Jon Loomer Really thinking largely my wife, Lisa, too. She's so deeply involved in your school and on top of what are you doing? Are you doing your homework? And whatnot, it's a lot of credit to her. AJ Wilcox Oh, it's fantastic. Shout out to Lisa. Well, John, anything else you want to share with us about anything you're working on? Or anything you feel like it'd be helpful to us as LinkedIn marketers? Jon Loomer No, I think just to stick with a theme, you know, be re to constantly evolve. And whether this is about LinkedIn marketing, or about your brand and your business. I think I have a unique perspective of having been in this was my business for 11 years and was at a very high point. And then I stopped evolving, thinking I could just keep going with these same approaches forever. It'll always work for me. And you have to understand that the way people consume the way people buy, the needs people have, how you do things on what platforms and what for, like, all those things have to constantly be evaluated. There is no new universal, this is always going to work. So be open to change, I think is my best advice for any marketer or any business owner. AJ Wilcox That's fantastic advice. Jonn, thanks again for accepting the invitation to come on here, sharing all this value. Where do you want people to follow you, find you, any of that? Jon Loomer I guess that depends on where you consume content, but jonloomer.com is my home base. So if you still use websites, go there. Otherwise, you can easily find me on TikTok at Jon Loomer Instagram at Jon Loomer. Listen to a podcast now. I mean, The Podcast with Jon Loomer as well. Actually a lot of those episodes these days are repurposed TikTok videos. They're nice, short, quick and to the point. Oh, that's cool. We could have a whole other topic about that too sometime! AJ Wilcox We can and we and we probably awesome. Thanks so much, John. Jon Loomer Awesome. Thanks so much, AJ. 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. AJ Wilcox If you look down in the shownotes, you'll see links to jonloomer.com, his TikTok, his podcast, and the link to follow him on LinkedIn. So definitely check those out. Also, if you or anyone else is looking to learn more about LinkedIn Ads, check out the link in the show notes for the course that I did on LinkedIn Learning all about LinkedIn Ads. It's by far the highest quality and the lowest cost course out there. If this is your first time listening, welcome, we're excited to have you here. Hit that subscribe button. We'd absolutely love to have you around next episode. But if this is not your first time listening, a terrific zero cost way that you can support us is to look down, hit the rate and leave us a review in whatever podcast player you listen on. You probably hear this from a lot of podcasters, but it really makes a big difference to leave us reviews. So please help us get the word out. Also with any questions, suggestions, feedback, corrections, anything you want to give us around the show, email us at podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Low Budget Strategies Episode Offers Episode Who Should and Shouldn't Advertise on LinkedIn Episode NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Youtube Channel Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review!   Show Transcript Should small businesses run LinkedIn Ads? We're digging into why or why not 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! We all know that LinkedIn Ads are expensive. So should small businesses even invest in them? It's not a straightforward question. So let's discuss what the requirements are for success on LinkedIn Ads, as well as the limitations that are present for small businesses, especially compared to large ones. If you remember all the way back to Episode One, we talked quite a bit about who should and shouldn't invest in LinkedIn Ads. We mentioned how the targeting is exquisite. Because when you need the targeting that LinkedIn has, there just is no substitute out there. But boy, do we pay dearly for that targeting. The cost per click, and the cost per impression on LinkedIn ads are quite high compared to the other platforms. So because the costs are high, you need to make sure that your company has a large enough lifetime value when you close a deal so that you can still realize a return on your investment. So for instance, if you have a really low cost product, say it's a SAS software, that you charge, maybe $50 or $100 per month, just the fact that your lifetime value is lower, is probably not going to allow you to get a return on your investment unless you have incredible customer retention. So I tell people, if you have a lifetime value of $10,000, or $15,000, or even higher, it's pretty much a no brainer to run LinkedIn Ads. But also because those costs per click and per impression are high. That also means that you need a higher budget for advertising. Higher budgets mean that you can get more clicks and more leads. And more volume is usually good for growth. Higher budgets also mean that you can learn faster from your tests and your experiments. So assuming you have the budget and the lifetime value, there are three things that are requirements for advertising on a social platform. I call this acronym amo, A-M-O, and it stands for your audience, your message and your offer. The audience is who you're targeting. And this is why we pay a premium to LinkedIn is this access to a very specific audience, the M you for your message, this is what your customer sees. And this is a combination of the ad copy you choose and the visuals, either imagery or video. Even the ad format that you choose. That's all part of the message. And then the O this is by far the most important part. This is what are you offering your prospect in exchange for their attention? Offers can be anything from come read this blog post to buy something now or everything in between? And this is funny, I just realized that the requirements for running LinkedIn Ads, spells blammo budget, lifetime value, audience message and offer. All right, so if you need help remembering this blammo, it's like one of those old 60s Batman blurbs that pops up when someone gets hit in the face - blammo! So when I get the question about whether small businesses should be advertising on LinkedIn, I think the inherent question inside of that is really should small budgets be spending on LinkedIn? I think there's this misconception that a small business automatically has a small budget, which is certainly not the case. We've worked with many clients who are very small companies with very large budgets. But I will admit, oftentimes these go together, we actually have a whole episode, it was back to Episode 14, all about how to advertise on really insanely small budgets. So go listen to that one if you haven't already. But what you should realize on LinkedIn is that with a smaller budget, you're either gonna have to sacrifice volume of your campaign by having a small budget, or you might sacrifice being able to segment your audiences or reach as many people from the audience that you want. So this could make you lose out on some audience insights, but it's definitely still doable. You'll also sacrifice speed, speed to learning. So if you're running an experiment to find out, is my audience going to care about this new topic or this new offer? The more budget you have, the faster you're going to learn. Another misconception is that small businesses automatically have small lifetime values. What I want you to understand is the size of the company doesn't dictate the stuff that really matters. A small company could have good budget, good offers and a high lifetime value. So as you're asking yourself this question, be specific about what elements of a small business make you worried about running LinkedIn Ads? Okay, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into the specific challenges as well as the recommendations for small businesses advertising on LinkedIn. The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts 5:07 If you're a B2B company and care about getting more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, then chances are LinkedIn Ads are for you. But the platform isn't easy to use, and can be painfully expensive on the front end. At B2Linked, we've cracked the code to maximizing ROI while minimizing costs. Our methodology includes building and executing LinkedIn Ads strategies that are customized to your unique needs, and tailored to the way that your B2B consumers buy today. Over the last 11 years, we've worked with some of the largest LinkedIn advertisers in the world, we've spent over $150 million on the platform, and we're official LinkedIn partners. If you want to generate more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, book a discovery call at B2linkedin.com/apply. We'd absolutely love to get to work with you. Alright, let's jump into some small business challenges. Obviously, if your business is small, it means you're going to be limited on headcount. And also some other things as well. Oftentimes, when a company is small, they don't have as many people working on projects, there could be a lack of understanding of strategy or vision for pushing the LinkedIn marketing forward. So you definitely want to give some thought into what are the growth strategies that you could use on LinkedIn Ads to grow quickly? What are the types of things that you want to be promoting in your ads? Do you have existing content like a newsletter or a podcast? What really matters is that you're solving a pain point for that audience member. The format of your offer doesn't matter nearly as much as the promise of what this offer is going to solve for someone. If you're looking for followers for your page, what is the reason to want to follow you? What are you providing them with? Is there going to be daily or weekly content? Are you meeting their pain points or their needs. We have Episode 10, all about offers so if you want to go super deep into that, go back and listen to that. But it doesn't matter what you're promoting, even if you're going right for the kill, and you're promoting your products or services directly to cold audiences, which doesn't oftentimes work. But it can. Make sure you understand the audience well enough so that you can call out their solution to their pain points. Another challenge for small businesses is small budgets. Sometimes the solution for having small budgets is just setting the expectation with your higher ups that you need a certain amount of budget to move forward. If you're running ads in North America, I found that $5,000 a month is a really good starting spot. If you're spending much less than that, it can be hard to be driving enough value out of it or enough volume to even care about or notice whether or not it's working. So if you're in a small company or a startup, you may have some inexperienced leadership and their expectations of what marketing should be may have to be either set or reset. For instance, you might have to let them know, if they're expecting to just start running ads today, and then get a return tomorrow, and then reinvest those funds, you may have to reset their expectations that it doesn't really work like that, we have a certain amount of time that we have to show ads. And then once we've captured them, then we have our own sales cycle that can take 6, 8, 12, 20 months. So don't be afraid to go help your higher ups understand and set those expectations with them of what they can expect from their LinkedIn marketing program. If you are stuck with a really small budget, we found that front loading that budget can be a good thing to do. So for instance, I mentioned that we like to start people around $5,000 a month in ad spend. Well, if you only have let's say $2,000 a month to spend on ads, you may be able to ask the company upfront for hey, let's take two and a half months worth of budget. And we're going to spend that all front loaded in a single month. This is going to help us learn very quickly, so that we can then decide what to do with our future advertising dollars. I mentioned that small companies can have small headcount. So if you do represent a small company, chances are you're wearing a lot of hats. You might be responsible for running the LinkedIn Ads, and the Google Ads, oh, and the email platform and managing and cleaning up Google Tag Manager. So sometimes when you don't have very many people to do things, you need outside help. You're not going to hire someone full time just because you want to run an email campaign. But you can hire a freelancer or a contractor or an agency for the stuff and the expertise that you don't have the headcount or time to dedicate to it. Sometimes small businesses are constrained for resources. You really wish you could create more content offers, more ebooks, more guides, more webinars, all of that. But you can't move forward because you don't have an in house designer. Well, there are some great services out there that you can outsource design to. There are great agencies who will write content offers up for you Oh, there's at least one great agency who will run your LinkedIn Ads, shameless plug. So don't be afraid to look outside of your own constrained resources for contractors and freelancers and agencies who can help plug those gaps that you might have. Going back to setting expectations with your higher ups. One tool that we found to be successful is, you could share the first episode of this podcast with them, because that's all about who should and shouldn't advertise on LinkedIn Ads, and what to expect from it. So if you sent them this podcast, I may be able to help explain to them and get them on your side. And I would be remiss if I didn't mention that sometimes small businesses or startups, they may not be certain about their product market fit. And if you don't have a good business to begin with, running ads, isn't really going to be your answer. My friend Dennis Yu mentions sometimes that ads are like adding fuel that amplifies an existing fire. So if your company is the equivalent of a tiny little flame, or no flame at all, when you dump adds fuel on top of it, you may smother that flame, or it may just not grow very big. To put it another way, advertising is kind of like amplifying. And so if you have a great business and you amplify it, more people find out about that great business. But if you don't have a great business, you're just going to be amplifying something that others aren't interested in. And there's not a lot you can really do if your company doesn't have product market fit. You can of course make recommendations to the higher ups. You can actually use LinkedIn Ads to test for product market fit. Years and years ago, I remember reading the Tim Ferriss boo, Four Hour Workweek. And he talks about how he actually put his book titles in Google Ads and based off of the click through rate or the volume of the clicks that came through, that was how he decided what to name his books. You can do the same thing with LinkedIn Ads. You can put some ads up to a specific audience testing a certain kind of offer that maybe it's something light, maybe it's just a blog post, but you're looking to see, does this audience actually care about this? And it can be actually pretty cheap market research, and it can be very fast as well. All right. I hope that was really helpful for you and understanding what small businesses can do on LinkedIn Ads. Now 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. 12:44 All right, like we mentioned in the episode, if you're interested in listening to the episode all about low budget strategies, that's Episode 14. And you'll see the link for that down in the show notes. We also mentioned the episode all about offers what you can actually use to get people's attention on LinkedIn. And that's Episode 10. And we also mentioned Episode One all about who should and shouldn't advertise on LinkedIn, and what expectations you should have about the platform. Now, if you or anyone you know, is looking to learn more about LinkedIn Ads, send them the link there in the show notes below for the course all about LinkedIn Ads that I did with LinkedIn Learning. It's by far the least expensive and the highest quality course out there. If this is your first time listening, welcome. I'm excited to have you here. Definitely hit that subscribe button. I'd love to have you back around next episode. But if this is not your first rodeo, I would encourage you to please rate and review us in whatever podcast player you're listening in right now. It's not just something I say, it really helps us get the word out. It's a terrific zero cost way that you can support us. With any questions, suggestions, corrections, anything you want to send us, send us at Podcast@B2LInked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. We're cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: B2Believe Event NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Youtube Channel Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review!   Show Transcript LinkedIn's B2Believe event happened last week in San Francisco and shared some groundbreaking stuff for LinkedIn Ads. Just in case you missed it, I'm recapping all the highlights 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. For my US listeners, I hope you had an amazing Thanksgiving holiday. I sure did. I ate way too much. I brought my VR headset and watched all the kids play a game called Richie's Plank Experience. I don't know if any of you know this game. But it basically takes you to the top of a building and you can stand out on a plank, and basically feel what it feels like to step off a building. I watched one of my nephews totally like sprint right into a wall. It didn't hurt my VR headset, thank goodness. But definitely one of the best things I've ever gotten to watch. I also got to geek out with my father in law about home automation, and new advances in ham radio communication. So like I mentioned in the teaser, LinkedIn hosted an in person event live in San Francisco. Tt was right on the pier. It was beautiful. It was well organized. And honestly one of the most impressive events I've ever seen Many of the sessions were recorded for being able to watch remotely. So you'll see a link down in the show notes below to go and watch for yourself if you'd like to get caught up. But I especially wanted to highlight some of the best parts, just in case you didn't have time to attend, or even watch the recaps. So also, the day following was a day just for partners called Partner Connect. And there was a bunch more content, but most of it was just for partners under NDA. So I'll share as much as I can, but I won't be able to give you much by way of recap there. But I do want to say a huge thanks to my friends at LinkedIn for the great conversations and the fun times we got to have. A special shout out to Purna Virji, who is a great friend. She's making huge waves at LinkedIn. She used to be a Microsoft Ads evangelist. She is absolutely magic on stage and her session did not disappoint. I love getting to meet and hang out with your team Purna. Thanks so much for letting me hang with you. And also a special shout out to Dan Philippi. Always great getting to catch up with you. Dan was the manager of a team that used to have the most elite ad reps. So when I very first got started advertising on LinkedIn, he and his team who I owe a great deal of gratitude for everything they taught me and showed me all about LinkedIn Ads. Okay, before we get into a recap of the event, there is some huge news out there to share. So the first one, I want to give a hat tip to Alisa Gammon, a great friend of mine. She shared with me that Facebook released their B2B targeting globally. There are five segments that we now get to use. So number one, business decision maker titles and interests. And this is people who are business decision makers based on their job titles that Facebook has, as well as interests. Number two, there's IT decision makers, and this is people who are IT decision makers based on their job titles. Number three is business decision makers. And meta creates this by using a combination of job titles and interests. And it's looking for decision makers in Engineering, IT, Operations, HR, Strategy, or Marketing. And make note this is not necessarily just the C suite or chief, although it does include them. Number four, we have new active businesses with buckets of less than six months old, less than a year old, and less than two years old. And this is based on company pages on Meta being set up in that time period. So if a new page gets set up, then Meta is assuming that it's a new business. And then number five, the fifth targeting facet that we get on Facebook is company size. They have small being 10 to 200 employees, medium being 200 to 500. And then large enterprises, which is 500 plus employees. And I'm telling you about this because I'm imagining that most of you listening are in B2B. And most of you are probably also responsible for the Facebook Ads channel. If you want to take advantage of this, you can find the B2B segments in ads manager under detailed targeting, you'll click on demographics, then work, then industries. Although if you're looking for the new active businesses, that's under behaviors, and then digital activities, I'd love to hear about your experience. If you're also using these segments to test especially against the same types of segments that you're using in LinkedIn Ads. Obviously, the targeting isn't nearly as good. It's not nearly as precise. It's not nearly as accurate or even up to date, but it is going to be a lot cheaper. So hey, maybe it works. Next item in the news is a doozy. Back on November 17th, advertisers got an email in their inbox called Exciting Changes Coming to LinkedIn Messaging. It looked innocuous enough, but there were some big things announced in here. So let's talk through them and make sure we understand them. First, if you didn't know, LinkedIn is coming out with a focused inbox, and I've had access to this now for many months, and I have to say I kind of like it. The idea is you have two different inboxes. One that is your Focused Inbox, where it's most likely to be the things that are of important to you, and then others that are probably going to be spam. When I look in my unfocused inbox, I see a lot of Sales Navigator Inmails being sent out that are most likely unsolicited, or what I would call spam. So this ramp began on the 16th of November here in 2022. And so if you don't already see it in your inbox, chances are you'll see it here in the next few weeks. That one's obviously mostly around organic for LinkedIn. But if we read further, we'll start to see the impacts on LinkedIn Ads. The next announcement here is Conversation Starter Ads that are launching in Q2 of 2023. It says we're introducing Conversation Starter Ads, a new way to engage in conversations with your audience. Conversation Starter Ads will appear as a rotation of ads in a fixed placement in the inbox, encouraging members to click to initiate conversations in the focused tab. This new ad eliminates the 30 day frequency cap for today's sponsored messages, which is actually really cool if you listened to the last episode all about frequency caps. But here's the biggie. The email says timed with the launch of Conversation Starter Ads, we will sunset Message Ads. So that means if you are using Message Ads, these are going to be going away in Q2 of 2023. It also says it's going to convert all of your existing Conversation Ads into Conversation Starter Ads. So the recommendation here is shift your budgets away from Message Ads and into Conversation Ads as soon as possible, just so you can take advantage of the automatic conversion. Like I said, it's a big deal. The next one was Click to Message Ads that are coming out in Q1 of 2023. So we're getting close for that one. It's a new ad format that grabs the members attention in the feed, and then invites them to engage in conversations to learn more about your product or services that will occur right in the focus tab. And for those of you who are in the EU, I'm sure your biggest question is our Conversation Starter Ads and Click the Message Ads, will we get access to that? The answer is no. LinkedIn says they won't be available to target members in the EU. So like I said, big stuff happening. That's a big announcement that just kind of went under the radar. And I was excited to share it with you. Okay, now to the topic at hand. Let's hit it. 7:44 Opening up the event, Greg Willis, who's the Vice President of Global Sales at LinkedIn, he mentioned that in business to business, we're lefties in a right handed world. I love that because I've always felt like B2B has gotten the shaft. Google Ads has never cared about B2B. Facebook has obviously been very focused on B2C, and hasn't given us very much love in B2B at all. So I sure love that thought. Then we had Mel Selcher go on stage who's the Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at LinkedIn. And she talked about promise making being something that brands do how we promise to fix a problem. She used some really cool examples like the iPod, because it was not the first mp3 player. Shout out to my Diamond Rio fans. Apple's promise of having 10,000 songs in your pocket, really propelled it into a new space. She also used the example of James Watt, who was the inventor of the horsepower. Steam engines were so powerful, but miners didn't understand or trust them. So they just kept using horses to do their work. So he went on to express that the steam engine has 10 horses in a machine and people got that promise of a wow, this is more powerful. She used the example that coke doesn't market itself as a sweet Brown and fizzy drink and neither should you and B2B. Coke isn't trying to explain what it is the specific features of the drink. No, Coke is talking about how you feel and what sort of experiences you have while you're enjoying it, and family and the good feelings around you. So if coke isn't marketing itself as a sweet, brown and fizzy drink, neither should you and B2B. Products don't speak directly to consumers, but promises do. Your promise really is your vision. She used an example that I absolutely love being a diehard B2B fan. She said B2B is amazing. You have ServiceNow, Salesforce, Block, and Nvidia. She said all of them have a market cap that is greater than Nike, Coke, Adidas, and GM combined. These are B2B companies, and they've totally reinvented our world. And it's harder to reach the buyers for B2B. We don't necessarily understand the buyers of B2B tools, the same way that we understand the buyers of shoes, but that's really changing. 9:59 Then, Jim Habig took the stage. He's the VP of Marketing for LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. My big takeaways from his were, don't make a promise that you can't keep and make your promise valuable, make them memorable. He used examples of TV commercials. One for commerce tools with Will Arnett in it. One was a HubSpot ad that was talking about aiding pirates. And another was a Salesforce ad with Matthew McConaughey and a hot air balloon. This is big talent. This is big money. These are big brands. Llike I've always felt like B2B should be. 10:32 Next I want to talk about Gyanda Sachdeva's presentation. She's the Head of Product at LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. Her presentation was all about the LinkedIn Aads Product Roadmap, which of course had my ears perked up. She talked about a new ad format, letting us promote individual employees posts with their permission. That's one I'm especially excited about because with LinkedIn Ads, we've only ever been able to boost a post from a company page. It's going to be a big deal to boost posts from individuals. She talked about Click to Message Ads, like we talked about in the news. She talked about Document Ads, but those have already been released now for some time. She talked about Conversation Starter Ads, which again, we talked about in the news. She also talked about connected TV solutions, and instream video ads through LinkedIn Ads, which I think is going to be really interesting. For those of us who are buying media for TV, Gyanda also talked about what they're doing around identity. She said that in B2B, we have the user, we have the advocate, we have the financier, and the decision maker. And they've had to rethink the definition of marketing identity, especially with all of the privacy concerns that have been coming up recently. She advocated reaching the groups of buyers, not just individuals. She said we don't need individual identity, we need group identity. And by the way, I totally disagree with this. I've seen this over and over with other ad platforms, when they feel like politically, they have to take power away from the marketers, this is never in our best interest. It's never a feature or a benefit. So please don't communicate it like it is one. Next, she talked about what they're doing on the product roadmap for measurement. She talked about how difficult it is that when we're marketing using many different platforms to have our data in so many different places. So LinkedIn is going to be coming out with what she calls Clean Rooms. These are trusted places to put your data and LinkedIn's to create a clean data set. And this is across multiple channels. You'll be able to run reports and get insights specifically for something like if a particular customer is going to get lost, how you can then reactivate them. We will also have access to website actions, which is grouping people into behavioral patterns. And she said there's no extra code to setup, I'm imagining that means that all of this is going to be powered by our existing insight tag. What I love about the Clean Room is this is effectively what we've already built internally for our agency. We've got this really cool data warehouse, where we store everything and have complex queries to pull it out and assemble it in the ways that we want. We inject it into dashboards, we inject it into Excel reports that we can give our clients. We've done lots of cool stuff. But now with these Clean Rooms, it sure sounds like that's going to replace a lot of what we've already built internally, which is just fine with me. She mentioned a revenue attribution report that is already going to be able to sync into Salesforce, and Microsoft Dynamics. And she also mentioned a new B2B index that's coming out that's judging the creative quality of a brand and the audience intent, as well as the investment of a brand. And so there'll be able to put us all on a B2B index, where we can measure ourselves, which really isn't that much different for any of you who have ever gotten a content marketing score from your LinkedIn rep. It sounds like it's just that but going to get a little bit more advanced. And finally, she talked about a B2B marketplace where every B2B product has a place to connect with it and see who in your network can vouch for it, or you can ask questions. There'll be expert articles, you'll be able to test drive anything right from LinkedIn. And she made sure to let us know that even with all of this that's being announced, it's not nearly even the whole list of what's being innovated for us marketers. Definitely one of the most exciting sessions I got to attend. All right, here's a quick sponsor break. And then we'll dive into LinkedIn Chief Economist talking about what to expect during the upcoming recession, as well as a conversation with Ben Stiller. The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts 14:46 If you're a B2B company and care about getting more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, the chances are LinkedIn Ads are for you. But the platform isn't easy to use and can be painfully expensive on the front end. At B2Linked, we've got cracked the code to maximizing ROI while also minimizing costs. Our methodology includes building and executing LinkedIn Ads strategies that are customized to your unique needs, and tailored to the way that B2B consumers buy today. Over the last 11 years, we've worked with some of the largest LinkedIn advertisers in the world, we've spent over $150 million on the platform, and we're official LinkedIn partners. If you want to generate more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, book a discovery call with us today at B2Linked.com/apply. We'd absolutely love to get to work with you. All right, let's jump into Ben Stiller's interview. So this was Ty Heath from LinkedIn, she got to interview Ben Stiller on stage. And it was all about pushing creative boundaries. First of all, for some backstory on this, I got a chance to talk to Ty Heath behind the scenes. And she said that Ben Stiller flew in on a red eye that morning, and got to do a little bit of a VIP event before this show. She said that he was really kind, he asked real questions and really gave his full attention to those VIPs, it was really cool to see someone who is quite frankly, really, really famous. And he genuinely seemed like a really cool guy. He opened up by saying, hey, just so you know, I know nothing about business. And this is the first time I've ever heard the phrase B2B. So of course, this is when most marketers start to tune him out and say, okay, you don't really know anything about what we do. But I really appreciated his insights into the creative process. He talked about his creative process, being just expressing himself in a way that's honest and meaningful to him. He said, I didn't think about what I was doing, I just did what I wanted to do. You don't label it when you're young. He also said creatively, it's very difficult to figure out what people are going to want. Eventually, if you keep creating what you think is funny, and doing your own thing, then people will start to appreciate that. And of course, when he's talking about creating what he thinks is funny, we should restate that in our minds as creating something that engages or that catches people's attention. But of course, in his career, making something that was funny was really the goal. There was a conversation that I thought was really, really interesting. He said, sometimes you're right, and sometimes you're wrong about what you think is funny. And he laughed, saying, I've been wrong a few times. But when you're wrong a few times, you start to question, do you have it? And that's the scary part because you have to take those chances and be willing to fail. You have to know that failure is definitely an option and it will happen and it's not fun. But it's also part of the process. He talked about risk. You have to risk because if you play it safe, you're not going to please anybody or break any new ground. And I love this quote, "We all know that there are real world consequences when we fail, but it's not the end of the world. When things aren't going good. It gives you the creative space to step back and ask myself why I'm doing what I'm doing. And if you're doing it for the affirmation of everyone else, of course, that feels good, that's the wrong reason to be doing it." So I ended up getting a lot more out of that conversation than I thought I was going to from a movie star. 18:14 Next, the CMO of the company ServiceNow he shared things in a fireside chat kind of format. He talked especially about brand and how there's this exponential effect when your brand overlaps into your demand category. He talked about it as a Venn diagram. And so when your brand Venn diagram overlaps with your demand that creates this exponential effect. And I forgot to mention, his name is Michael Park. But Michael mentioned this new initiative that they have called Rise Up. And he said, they're recruiting a million partners to stand up and deploy ServiceNow for their customers. And it's this low code app development, which sounds really cool for people who are looking for careers, who may not be technical enough to get into heavy code. That's really cool. My favorite quote from this one was, "Brand is the purpose and the purpose is the brand." It has to be in the DNA of what the company stands for, otherwise, it's not authentic. I'm sure you can notice a lot of conversation around branding. Okay, and then the one that I think is by far the most interesting, Karen Kimbrough, who's the LinkedIn Chief Economist, she talked about marketing in today's macro economic climate. She basically got up on stage and gave us a forecast of what to expect if we're going into a recession. Oh, I thought this was so interesting. She talked about how 2021 was a year of growth. It was like driving full speed on the freeway. The US was averaging an 8% growth in GDP, and how that kind of growth just isn't sustainable. In economics, when something goes up, it's eventually going to come down. Then we hit 2022. And she said it's like merging onto a different freeway where the traffic is quite a bit busier, and you've slowed down to about half speed. So maybe you're on a 70 mile per hour freeway. And then all of a sudden, now you're going 35. That's what happened to us this year in 2022. And then in 2023, she said, it will slow down even further. It's like, we'll be in bumper to bumper, zero mile per hour traffic. So now that she's scared us, we can talk about the realities here. So here's why it won't be as bad this time, as it was in 2008. I know a lot of you are older than me. And you probably remember a lot more. In 2008, I was just graduating from the university. And so that was the very first economic pullback that I remember. But I'm so glad that economists are paying attention to what has happened in the past so we know what's going to repeat. She said back in 2009, peak unemployment was around 10%. And then in 2020, it was up to 14.7%. But in the next year into 2023, she expects peak unemployment rates to be around 4.8, maybe up to 5%. So we're talking about a third of where it was just in 2020. During the COVID 19 pandemic. She also mentioned that the labor market remains tight. That tech and real estate are a little bit scary right now, because those are the headlines we're seeing about Meta laying people off and Amazon and all that, but not all industries are cutting. She said that internally at LinkedIn, they've noticed that their ads business is down about 5% year over year, so just a little bit softer than it was last year. So I felt really great about that. She also gave suggestions on investing in our team. She said, especially try to build resilience in your teams, invest in your talent, focus on internal mobility, those are the kinds of things that are going to help you retain your staff. She also looked at the marketing industry in general, and analyzed all of the skills that are being requested in marketing, job postings. She said customer experience is mentioned in 49% of all job postings, web content writing that's present in 39%, analytical skills are present in 35%, creativity skills in 31%, and content marketing was present and about 30%. So these are the skills and they're mostly soft skills that are in demand for marketers. And this makes a lot of sense to me. She talked about in bad times, if you make investments, it can become an opportunity. We all know someone who's pulling back budgets right now in preparation for a recession. But she said time and time again, from all of these studies that they've done, doubling down in those bad times, leads to increased sales advantage and increased profit advantage during the following years. She mentioned that the 2008 recession lasted about 18 months, the one in 2020 for the pandemic, it only lasted two months. She's expecting something for this recession, that's just going to be moderate. And she said we'll be out of it for 2024. She said it's maybe going to last six to nine months. And recap that recessions in the US happen every six to 10 years, and usually last on average about nine months. This was also really interesting, she mentioned that the Asia Pacific region doesn't appear to be heading into a recession. Most economies are but Asia Pacific, doing great. She gave us this little statement to consider, recessions are short, sales cycles are long. Karen, I really appreciate your outlook on that. It gives me a lot of confidence. Being a marketer right now, even in the face of watching some budgets get cut and all of that. 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. 24:08 If you want to watch any of these recordings, I have a link to the whole event. They're set up as webinars on the LinkedIn marketing solutions page. So check that out in the show notes below. Also, if you or anyone else is looking to learn more about LinkedIn Ads, maybe you're just looking to get trained or just getting started, I did a course with LinkedIn Learning all about LinkedIn Ads. It's linked to in the show notes below and it is by far the most detailed and the least costly course out there. So I highly recommend it. If this is your first time listening, welcome, excited to have you here. Make sure to hit that subscribe button so that you hear all of our content here in the future, in case this was helpful to you. And if this is not your first time listening, I would encourage you to rate and especially to leave a review for us. It's a great no cost way to support all of the hard work we do to put into this podcast. With any tips, suggestions, corrections, anything you've got, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Should you bid CPC or CPM? Episode on saturation NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Youtube Channel Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review!   Show Transcript Today, you're going to learn way more about frequency caps on LinkedIn Ads than you ever thought you wanted to know. We're talking about frequency 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, there's a lot of confusion around the frequency caps on LinkedIn. If you talk to your LinkedIn rep, they'll tell you, but it's not published anywhere in the LinkedIn Help section, at least that I've found. Plus, many of you advertisers won't have a dedicated rep. So I wanted to create a resource where we could clear up some of the questions about it, and make sure you stick around to the end, because I'm going to be sharing a hack that you can use to break the LinkedIn frequency caps, you won't want to miss that. In the news, make sure you're subscribed to our YouTube channel, because we published this week, a video walkthrough all about whether you should bid by cost per click or cost per impression. And we showed all of the math behind it. So if you're a total math nerd, or really want to understand LinkedIn's auction, you won't want to miss that it's about a 10 minute video. I want to thank those of you who have been leaving reviews on the show. A huge thank you because as you know, reviews are a huge part about what gets the show picked up and shared and featured a shout out to "Mad" Matt N. Who said, "Highly recommended if you're advertising on LinkedIn. AJ drops tons of knowledge in every episode, I was very fortunate to discover his show before I actually started advertising on LinkedIn. He really helped set expectations regarding what to expect from a management standpoint, and saved me countless hours of banging my head against the wall asking questions like, Why doesn't the platform do insert missing feature we take for granted after advertising on Facebook. Because of his show, I was able to set up my tracking properly out of the gate and have a very low stress launch with no surprises." Matt, that makes me extremely happy to hear that you found out about the show before you started advertising and that we were able to help you iron out some of the kinks before they even got introduced to your accounts. So great work on your part. We also had sweet.tvb. And she mentioned, "Great resource for marketers. I've been running LinkedIn Ads for the past three years and this show gives a wealth of in depth information to push performance further. Love the helpful insight presented." Thanks so much sweet. And for everyone else out there, make sure you leave a review. I'd love to shout you out. So let's go ahead and jump into frequency. Let's hit it. First, I think we need to understand what frequency actually is. Frequency is basically the number of times that an ad is served to an entity of some kind. It's measured as the total number of impressions divided by the unique people who saw those ads. The unique users or unique visitors, those are called reach as well. So if your ad gets 10 impressions, but it was only served to five unique people, that means the, on average, each member of your audience saw that ad two times. And of course, it's not total science, it's totally possible that one of those five people saw your ad three times, while another one of them only saw it once. It is after all an average. And frequency can be measured by the individual ad, meaning how many times has that audience member seen this one ad, or you can measure at the campaign level, how many times each audience member has been exposed to any of the ads in this campaign. You can view your frequency numbers inside of campaign manager. You first go to columns that are right above your list of campaigns, and select the drop down called Delivery. That's going to show you your frequency and reach and all of the numbers that deal with that. If you remember, LinkedIn kind of took these numbers away or averaged them together for a certain amount of time. It appears that this has been reverted, but I think in the future, we can expect some of these numbers to be a little bit obscured for privacy reasons, which I do not get. But hey, make hay while the sun shines. So that's frequency. But then let's talk about frequency caps. The lack of frequency caps is what makes live TV so annoying. Because TV advertisers don't get feedback on which households have seen which ad, they have to make sure that everyone in that audience has been exposed to their ad a certain number of times. So they showed over multiple ad breaks of the same show. And then you find yourself hating a brand because you've already seen these ads 1000 times and they're so annoying. If live TV, were able to have a frequency cap, the station would then get feedback on which ads were viewed by which households. And then once they'd seen it a time or two or three or whatever it is, they'd serve a different ad in its place. And that would keep the audience from saturating against the ads and that brand. And obviously live TV can't do this yet. Although streaming services, I'm looking at you, you could do this a heck of a lot better. It's a technology limitation of broadcast television. But digital services should be able to account for this. And maybe they do to some degree. Digital ad platforms build in frequency caps and this is to help have individual users from getting bombarded from the same ads over and over. And that would cause them to have a negative experience on the platform. Or you've got Facebook, which decided to punish its users and advertisers with no control over frequency caps for 10 plus years, it's certainly a choice. But in LinkedIn's case, they decided early on to have a more conservative frequency cap on ads, because they cared so much about the user experience. So here in just a moment, we'll go into the individual frequency caps for the ad formats. But first, I think we need to talk about how frequency affects behavior. I'm sure everyone's heard the maxim that it takes seven touches with a brand before someone will consider purchasing from that brand. So obviously, you want to make sure that you are getting some sort of a frequency with each individual user. But it is a fine line because too many touches will result in annoying and saturating an audience. So over time, as you serve ads, you can expect to be warming this audience over time. And that audience should then come to know like and trust you. And you should see conversion rates of your ads improve over time. But how do you know if this is working, or if you're just annoying your audience members with repeated touches. This is a very difficult analysis, but here's how I would approach it. First, track your trends of your click through rates over time, and especially pay attention to what happens when you refresh your ads. And when I talk about an ad refresh, I'm mostly talking about when you're advertising the same offer, but you're switching up the ad to just describe the offer in a different way to keep things fresh. But you'll also want to pay attention to what happens to your click through rates when you launch radically different creative. This could be whole new offers. This could be offer against offer tests. This could even be very different imagery. But whatever it is, pay attention because as you launch your ads, you'll get a certain click through rate. And then over time, you'll see that click through rate fall. It might take weeks, a month, several months, who knows. But over time those click through rates will settle. And then as you do a light refresh, you'll probably see your click through rates pop back to about where they started. And if this is the case, chances are you're just seeing normal saturation in your ads. These are people who have already seen this ad and have decided they've already taken the action or they're not going to take the action. But let's say you see that your click through rates don't pop back up on light refreshes, but maybe they do after a radical refresh. Chances are you're now seeing saturation in your offer itself. But there could be even brand saturation built in there as well. But this is where you don't want to be. If your click through rates don't pop back at all, no matter how many refreshes you try, no matter how radical those refreshes Are. Chances are now that your audience is fully saturated of your brand. And you've probably got a lot of negative sentiment to fix. We do have a whole episode on saturation. So if you haven't already listened to it, go back and listen to episode 29. So like we mentioned, LinkedIn really takes its frequency cap seriously. Each ad format has its own frequency cap rules. So let's tackle each of these by ad type. I think we have to start with sponsored content. And this has evolved over time with even somewhat recent changes. So I'm going to do my best to describe what I believe the current standard is here. But feel free to reach out and correct me if you know better. This is all based on the number of creatives that you have in any given campaign. If you have one or two creatives in a campaign, the most that that campaign can serve its ads to an individual user on LinkedIn is one every 24 hours. But as soon as you start including more creatives in a campaign, let's say, three, four or five different ads in a campaign, it changes our frequency caps a little bit. It moves to a rule that LinkedIn calls 5 and 48. That rule is that in a 48 hour period, your ads are eligible to be shown to the same person, the number of times as the number of creatives you have in a campaign. It sounds a little bit complex, but it works like this. If you had three creatives in a campaign, that campaign would be eligible to show an individual user three ads from that campaign in a 48 hour period. If the campaign had four ads in it, you'd be able to show to that same member four times in a 48 hour period or two times per day. And it caps out at five, where you have five ads shown from that campaign to the same person in a 48 hour period, averaging out to two and a half times per day. What I don't know about this is if you had two duplicate campaigns targeting the same audience, where one of them had two ads, and one had three, would it still show to that member up to five times in 48 hour period? Or is it only per campaign? If you know reach out to me over LinkedIn or through our email address that will say here at the end of the show. 9:58 So that's sponsored con attend, then we have sponsored messaging like message ads and conversation ads. And currently, they have a very strict frequency cap of one in 30 days. But this is special as a frequency cap. It's not that only you are allowed to show one of these ads to someone every 30 days, it's if you send one, they don't get yours or anyone elses for 30 more days. They are reserved for 30 days. Early on, the sponsored messaging frequency cap used to be one every 60 days. And then over time, as they realized that their users weren't being annoyed, they lowered it down to one every 45 days. And now they've settled at one in 30 days. And over the last few years, I have heard rumors that LinkedIn could change it to one every 15 days, which I'm certainly not against. Because like we've talked about before, I think Sales Navigator inmails are way more constant and annoying than sponsored messaging ads. Okay, here's the quick sponsor break. And then we'll dive into the other ad formats, as well as that hack I told you about where you can use this to start breaking the frequency caps. The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. 11:16 If you're a B2B company and care about getting more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, then chances are LinkedIn Ads are for you. But the platform isn't easy to use, and can be painfully expensive on the front end. Here at B2Linked, we've cracked the code to maximizing ROI while minimizing costs. Our methodology includes building and executing LinkedIn Ad strategies, customized to your unique needs, and tailored to the way that B2B consumers buy today. Over the last 11 years, we've worked with some of the largest LinkedIn advertisers in the world, we've spent over $150 million on the platform, and we're official LinkedIn partners. If you want to generate more sales opportunities from your ideal prospects, book a discovery call at B2Linked.com/apply, we'd absolutely love the chance to get to work with you. All right, let's jump into text ads. So the short story long with text ads is that we don't know what the frequency cap actually is or how its measured. I'm gonna guess that it's probably around five ads per day per campaign. But it could actually be closer to like a seven to 10 times. But it averages like three to five due to member activity on the platform. Remember that text ads load only in the right rail on desktop. And they can load on most pages of LinkedIn as people are surfing around. So it's totally plausible that if they had a frequency cap of 10, that maybe many members only come and load two or three pages and then leave while some of the most active members are surfing around. And maybe they do get seven to 10 and it ends up coming out to like a frequency of around five. Dynamic ads are the same way. We don't know the exact number, but because they share the same inventory as text ads and text ads show a little bit more, I would expect the dynamic ads to have a frequency cap, maybe somewhere around like a three or four. It could also be based on a 24 hour period, or it could be a 48 hour period. not totally sure there. But here's the hack I was telling you about where you can break the frequency cap, we found that both text ads and dynamic ads have a really interesting quality to them. Because they're not tied to the company page like sponsored content, and plus the auction serving algorithm was created back in 2007, before company pages were even a thing, they wouldn't be limited the same way that sponsored content is, which is a certain number of ads that represent the same company page are served to the same person. So what they did is they created the frequency cap based off of the individual campaign, meaning that each user could only be exposed to ads in a campaign a certain number of times in this period. So then what's stopping an advertiser from creating additional campaigns that are targeting the same audience? Well, nothing, obviously. So I use this trick with text ads back in 2011, to get them to serve a lot more often. And I'd kind of forgotten about it. When my team recently did a bunch of really cool tests, where we found that you can do the same thing with dynamic ads. And this is how they stumbled upon it. The team was trying to get follower ads to spend more for a large multinational company that we work with. The hypothesis was that additional campaigns would allow the ads to be served more often to the same people. But we wanted to make sure that the duplicated campaigns didn't cannibalize each other. Because this happens a lot on LinkedIn, where you have two campaigns targeting the same audience. And all of a sudden, your traffic gets split between the two campaigns, or one of them takes over and gets most of the clicks and impressions and the other one starts to get ignored. So in order to control for this, they made a duplicate of each of the campaigns, but made them run at different times during the day. And because we built our own internal ad scheduling tool, we ran the original campaigns for the first 12 hours of the day, and then shut those off and had the duplicates run the second half of the day. And they noticed that the frequency numbers among the campaigns nearly doubled when they did this. So in this case, if we were only running the originals, they would get a frequency of about five and a half. But when we ran both of them at different times, that both campaigns could get a frequency of five and a half. So then we wondered if it would produce the same results if both the original and the duplicated campaign ran at the same time, and were essentially allowed to cannibalize each other. What we found is, in this case, it didn't make much of a difference. We had one campaign that got a frequency of 5.8, another one that got a frequency of 5.1. And so altogether, we ended up around a frequency of 11. So if you need to do this, you can do it with dynamic ads. And you can also follow the same logic to do it with text ads. And of course, you'll need to decide if it's worth potentially upsetting your audience. So your mileage may vary. But this is a tool that you can leave in your tool belt. 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. 16:27 All right, check down in the show notes for any of these links. But first up, we have that YouTube video on whether you should bid by cost per click or by cost per impression. Again, you're not going to want to miss that one. We also mentioned the episode on saturation that you'll probably want to listen to and execute right alongside this one on frequency and frequency caps. That's episode 29. If you or anyone you know is looking to learn more about LinkedIn Ads, definitely check out the course that I did on LinkedIn Learning. It's the basics of LinkedIn Ads, and is by far the least expensive and the highest quality, of course, on LinkedIn Ads out there. So check it out. If this is the first episode you're listening to, I would invite you to subscribe if you liked what you heard. If this is not your first time here, please do me the honor of rating and reviewing the show. Honestly, those reviews mean a lot and it's the best zero cost way I can think of for you to support the show. With any questions, suggestions, feedback, anything about the show, reach out to us using the email Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. We're cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: How to Analyze Your LinkedIn Ads in Excel How to Evaluate Your LinkedIn Ads AB Tests in Excel NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Youtube Channel Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review!   Show Transcript Get ready for some killer LinkedIn Ads strategies, because we asked the community for their favorite LinkedIn Ads plays, and you delivered 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! We reached out to you, the LinkedIn Ads community, to ask you about your favorite LinkedIn ads plays. We're looking for those strategies that you're using daily to build and optimize for the best performance. In the news, I want to let you know about a couple of YouTube videos that we published. One is a full walkthrough within Excel on how to analyze your individual LinkedIn Ads, how your creative performance is. Another is all about how to evaluate your LinkedIn Ads AB tests within Excel. If you're not already following our YouTube channel, go subscribe there. I put the links down below in the show notes. Because those are something that you can follow along with, right as you're building the reports yourselves, and do better reporting better analysis for your company for your clients. They're directly actionable, and I think you're gonna love them. I've been asking, pleading for you marketers to leave reviews for the show, because I'm sure you know, the reviews are a big part about how people find out about the podcast. I wanted to give a huge thanks to several of you who stepped up and did it recently. I sincerely appreciate it. It makes the effort to design and create these episodes totally worthwhile. It's pretty hard for me to look at someone's Apple podcasts username, and try to figure out who they are. So feel free to reach out to me if I'm calling you out and you want me to let everyone know who you are. Okay, so Marketer Martina, she says, "Concrete actionable insights. I had been responsible for audience strategy and segmentation for years, but only recently started owning LinkedIn as a channel. When our results took a nosedive. I knew I needed to get more in depth insights into best practices than what LinkedIn is training courses offer. I found this podcast and it has been a lifesaver, offering easy to digest information with concrete actionable insights that can be immediately put into action. Thank you, AJ, for sharing all of your knowledge with us." Martina, I really appreciate the kind words that's exactly what we're going for here. We also had Brandon Chesnutt from Identity. He left a review that said, "One of the best resources for b2b marketers. If you're a B2B marketer looking to tap into the power of LinkedIn ads, don't waste any more time and subscribe to the LinkedIn ad show right now. I have a regular rotation of awesome marketing and communication podcasts in my feed. And I'm always excited when a new episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show pops up. AJ does a fantastic job of taking important LinkedIn ad topics from the very broad to the very niche and breaking down digestible and actionable takeaways. I'm regularly sharing links to episodes in our agency Slack channels, and utilizing many of the best practices highlighted with our clients." Thanks so much, Brandon, I really appreciate that. If this show is able to offer you up direct takeaways that you can go and put into action today. That's my goal. Makes me very happy. 3:05 So back to LinkedIn Ads plays. Here's the play that I shared to open up the conversation. I said, when launching ads start by manually bidding for clicks, then if your ads proved to consistently generate a click through rate that's two to two and a half times the average then switch to bidding by impressions. The reason this works is because you've proven to the platform that you can generate clicks at a healthy rate. Switching to impressions bidding mass distributes your ads to maximize reach and click volume at your consistent click through rate, which can help decrease costs. Now I have a really cool YouTube video to share with all of you that's going to be popping up here in the next couple of weeks. So again, make sure you're following our YouTube channel. But in it, I actually go into the math whether it's going to be cheaper to bid by cost per click or by the impression and how to figure out how competitive an audience really is. I also share the secrets to why it's the click through rate that's two to two and a half times the average. So you're definitely not going to want to miss that. So then I finished up this post with what's your favorite LinkedIn ads play? What's worked well for you and what were the results. I'd love to feature you on an upcoming episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show to drop a comment below. And I'll share your experience in the episode. Then we had so many of you sharing. We had shares across all social channels so we've compiled them here, and I'm going to share them right now. 4:23 We had Paul Fairbrother, who is a paid social specialist at HootSuite. And he shared, "I have a client where we weren't getting anywhere with lead gen. The cost per click was averaging $35 Canadian. I think part of the issue was that it was a case study more suited to later in the funnel. So we added in a video as the first touch with prospects optimizing for video views. Then by building a 25% video view audience, I remarketed them with a case study and got the CPC down to under $2. LinkedIn now offers lots of options for building simple two step funnels. So it's worth having a play with them if other strategies aren't working." You nailed it, Paul. I think LinkedIn is retargeting has become incredible in the last couple years, and I would highly suggest anyone to go follow Paul's advice. Then we had Nayan Prakash, who runs all kinds of paid media at a company called GMR web team out of India, he shared two plays number one, running a sponsored message ad and layering it with an ABM strategy for Account Based Marketing. It's one of my favorite plays in LinkedIn Ads. This ad type works best while using an existing database of target companies or contacts. And this campaign type won't be very effective in generating bottom of funnel leads, but helps them in grabbing decent top of funnel leads with some lead bait. In our case, we use the free scanner tool, which he then uses to introduce more about the brand, which then leads to taking those warm leads to the drip funnel. Here's what we basically did. First, we uploaded two different lists, one compatible for the company list, and another for the contact list. Then we segmented multiple campaigns based off of company sizes separately for both lists. That's it, those segmented campaigns helped in assessing which one was giving fruitful results and continuing with that one. While in the testing phase, back in December of 2021, the cost per lead used to be around $100 to $110 without segmentation. After segmentation, it reduced to 60 to $70. The open rate used to roam around 35 to 45%. So Nayan, I like a lot about what you're talking about. We found in a lot of cases sponsored message ads are very, very expensive. But when you're going after a very specific kind of person, especially with lists like you're doing and offering them something that feels like a personal invite, making them feel like a VIP, they really can perform quite well. His next play he said for sponsored single image ads. One thing that I personally love is retargeting those LinkedIn users who've already engaged with our other ad copy whether they liked the ad commented shared or clicked any of the links. LinkedIn will smartly chase them. And yes, I 100% agree with you AJ that this retargeting will be more accurate than website visits retargeting. Even the CPC ranges lesser when compared with the campaign having job title targeting. Not only this, but with retargeting, we start networking with engaged users through an organic approach, and a LinkedIn connection building strategy. We've seen a few assisted conversions while following this approach, and are still measuring the effectiveness of how far it will help. This strategy helped us to combine the paid and organic approach making the investment more worthwhile. In one case, one of our clients prospects got tired of seeing the retargeting ads of our clients brand, and finally ended up signing a contract with them. This literally made us laugh. So Nyan, I love this, especially love the retargeting aspect around single image ads. This is a new feature that we have. And I love the way that you're combining it with an organic strategy. And we had Adam Dolan who's the co-founder at First Spark Digital out of San Diego, California. And he said, "Love me some text ads. It's an underutilized ad inventory on the platform makes it easy for small brands or larger to maintain brand awareness at a very low cost, in most cases free. Plus, when you do get a click, you typically get to see good intent. And he followed up with interesting strategy with the bidding switch from impressions to clicks. Thanks for sharing." Adam, I 100% agree with you on text ads, they are hugely underrated and I love them, I would highly recommend running them alongside anything that you're running on, especially sponsored content. Here's a quick sponsor break and then we'll dive into at least three more play. The LinkedIn Ads show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. 8:34 If you're a B2B company and care about getting more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, then chances are LinkedIn ads are for you. But the platform isn't easy to use, and can be painfully expensive on the front end. At B2Linked though, we've cracked the code to maximizing ROI while minimizing costs. Our methodology includes building and executing LinkedIn Ad strategies, customized to your unique needs, and tailored to the way that B2B consumers buy today. Over the last 11 years, we've worked with some of LinkedIn's largest advertisers in the world, we've spent over $150 million on the platform, and we're official LinkedIn partners. If you want to generate more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, book a discovery call today at B2Linked.com/apply. We'd absolutely love to get to work with you. Alright, let's jump into our next play. We had Alexander Krastev, and he's the founder of a company called Bookmark out of Bulgaria. He responded to my play about first bidding by click and then switching to bidding by impressions when you get a high enough click through rate. And he said, "Great, I usually do a similar switch with the bidding strategy. First with maximize bid, and later if the max is too high with manual, but AJ, does the CTR remain relatively similar after you switched impressions?" So it sounds like Alexander does this the opposite way that I suggest. I start out by bidding by the click because that's generally the cheapest And then I switch over to maximum delivery when I see high click through rates, but you can go the opposite way, just like Alexander was talking about. He brings up a good question here, does your click through rate remain relatively similar, regardless of how you bid? And the answer to that is usually yes. If your ads are performing really well, when you're bidding by a cost per click, you generally have a good relevancy score associated with your ads with your campaign. And so LinkedIn is putting you in really good ad inventory, meaning usually higher up on the page. That way, when you switch to maximum delivery, you end up also getting really good inventory, because this is inventory that LinkedIn knows it's getting paid for, regardless of how the ads perform. So it usually puts it high up on the page, especially because maximum delivery is a really aggressive bid. It basically bids as high as it can on CPM to fill your budget. Where I see this differ. If your ads, while you're bidding by the click end up performing really poorly, let's say at or below the benchmark, click through rate, then you may end up having your ads fall into bad inventory further down the page, in which case, maximum delivery would actually put you in better inventory. But you would also pay a heck of a lot more per click. So it's definitely something you'd have to balance. Then we had Adriaan Boot, from Impactful in the Netherlands. He shared, "We actually see text links work really well, when advertising on LinkedIn. Text links bring in very high quality clicks for a very reasonable cost per click." And Adrian, what I'm imagining you're talking about is using text ads, just like Adam was mentioning,. We see them perform really well as well, but I totally understand why other advertisers may avoid using them. Simply because when you put the campaign together, it's not going to spend very much unless you have a pretty large audience. And so you might not think that there's anything going on. But like Adam mentioned, it does a really good job of keeping your brand in front of people. And it costs next to nothing, because it's the cheapest click that you can pay for on LinkedIn. At least in North America. We do see in some parts of the world text ads are actually more expensive than sponsored content. 12:06 Finally, we had Meiki Tanious. He is a growth hacker out of Boston for a company called Scalewhale. And he shared if you're doing B2B, an underrated LinkedIn Ads play is to use the Microsoft ads integration that was released a couple years ago. You can actually target users on Microsoft ads based on their LinkedIn. So your next question might be well, who uses Bing? But a lot of enterprise companies might be forced to use it due to a full Microsoft setup by IT with Office 365 plus Azure. And then as you might imagine, Bing Ads CPCs are much cheaper than LinkedIn Ads. Meiki, I totally hear you there. I was really excited when I heard Microsoft was coming out with the integration. And last I checked, you could really only target by some really broad things. You do get company name, which is cool. But job function and industry, I think were the other two that you could target by. So a little difficult to get super targeted. But you're right, the CPCs are so much lower. Meiki also mentioned, "Something else I've noticed that works really well is doing organic type targeting strategies. If you're running ads on LinkedIn, you're not reaching the same scale as the DTC meta campaign spending less and instead investing in OPS plus automation can make your ads way more effective. An example is instead of a lead form ad that everyone's used to test viral ask posts speaking to the audience's problem, like talking about how HIPAA is a pain in the butt and offer to DM people a free playbook or guide. If they wind up commenting on the post. Ask some people that you know, to comment and react to it to show engagement, then boom, you'll get people commenting. Then have an ops person automate the message sent to each user with the lead magnet and use a CRM to manage the ensuing conversations." Meiki, I absolutely love what you talked about with offering people content for commenting. This is something that we internally call comment gating. And it's a lot of work, if you're going to do it manually. Like you're talking about if you're using automation, that's great. As a LinkedIn partner, though, I can't recommend automation because it's against their terms. But we have done this both for clients and for ourselves. Comment gating is really cool way of not only getting a lot of cheap leads, but also growing your network with a bunch of really interested and targeted people. I asked Meiki for a follow up and just said, Hey, how are these strategies working for you? And he responded, "The Microsoft ads integration has worked really well for me when targeting ads at large and enterprise sized businesses. CPCs can go below $2 For desirable keywords, which is huge compared to LinkedIn's costs. Smaller B2B businesses I haven't tested this with, but I'd imagine there's not as much volume due to not being forced to use Bing. Then the organic strategy, he got to run for two different clients. It was massively successful compared to lead ads and landing pages in both instances. It comes from one of my greater philosophies, most people want an organic experience. If your ad doesn't feel natural, your customers are trained to ignore it." Meiki, I couldn't have said it better. Well done. 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. 15:22 Okay, like we talked about in the episode, down in the show notes, you'll see two links, going to the YouTube videos, where I walk you through exactly how to do certain types of reporting in Excel. You're not going to want to miss that. You'll also see the link to the YouTube channel, so you can make sure to subscribe. If you or anyone you know, is looking to do more with LinkedIn Ads, point them towards the course you'll see the link to that as well. And this is the one that I did with LinkedIn Learning, all about LinkedIn Ads. It's by far the highest quality and the lowest cost of any course I've found out there. It's a really good value. If this is your first time listening to us, welcome. And do remember to hit that subscribe button if this hasn't disappointed you. If this is not your first time listening, the biggest favor that you can do me personally for putting all these shows together is to go and rate and review the podcast on whatever podcast player you use. Usually it's Apple podcasts, but if you find anywhere else, that would be great. With any questions, feedback, suggestions, anything like that, send them to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives!

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: New Audiences Menu Document Ads Media Library Certified LinkedIn Marketing Experts program Reporting on LinkedIn Ads ROI NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Youtube Channel Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review!   Show Transcript Six LinkedIn Ads myths debunked 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! Over the year, we've heard a lot of myths about LinkedIn Ads. Today, we're going to bust them like Jamie and Adam, if you get the MythBusters reference. First off, we've got some really cool stuff in the news. Matched and saved audiences are now under one page called audiences. And this is gradually being rolled out, so if you don't see it already in your account, you may notice it soon. And I think this is a great change. Anytime that we can get more information on one page, more compactly, I'm usually a fan of it. And it does make sense to have all different kinds of audiences, all in one location. Document ads are also out and in full force. You can attach PDFs, PowerPoints, really any kind of media that has multiple pages, and then you can get them with a lead gen form. So for instance, you can say, for the first three pages of this ebook, I want someone to be able to scroll through it. But then once they reach page four, it displays the lead gen form and they need to fill it out in order to progress. It sounds really cool in theory, and it worked so well, during the initial beta that didn't have lead gen forms, I thought this was going to be an amazing ad format. But we've tested it quite a bit and we haven't yet found better performance than before, just with single image ads and a lead gen form. But I'd love to hear about any of your experience if you're experiencing anything differently. There's also a new feature called Media Library. And it allows you to upload multiple images at a time, and then use all those multiple images, up to five, to create multiple ads at a time. And this is just creating image tests, because all of these ads are going to have the same intro and the same headline, but just with a different image. So pretty cool, if you're testing your images. If it's rolled out to your account, you should be able to access it within campaign manager by clicking inside of a campaign that's either for single image or video ads, and clicking on create ad, then when you click on upload for images, it'll bring up the media library. The certified marketing experts program is live. You've heard me before talk about getting LinkedIn certified. And this is how you do it. There are quite a few different levels, and they take time to graduate through them. So if you haven't already go get started now. The link is in the show notes. We've also noticed that the floor bids are gone in many of the accounts we have access to. The way it used to work is that you would enter a bid that was below the floor. And it used to pop up a message telling you what the minimum bid is for that audience. And it wouldn't let you run unless you put in a number that was greater than that. But now on many of our accounts, I'd say at least half, it pops up a message that says your bid of x may be too low to reach your target audience, increase your bid for better results. Now, initially, I expected that this change was because the LinkedIn Audience Network clicks are significantly cheaper than the floor bid to reach a LinkedIn audience. So if someone bids below the floor, they would just be getting mostly traffic from the LinkedIn Audience Network. But I kind of proved myself wrong on this, because I went to go create a campaign, even with LAN turned off and the same message still appears. I do think this is good because I've always hated that there is a floor bid in order to advertise on LinkedIn. That's never made sense to me. So I do like this. But I haven't heard from LinkedIn why they did it. And it's truthfully uncharacteristic of them. All right, without further ado, let's hit it. We're gonna jump into six different myths that we've heard about LinkedIn Ads, and we're going to debunk them give you the truth. 3:49 Myth Number One Myth number one, LinkedIn Ads are too expensive. We have to start out by saying that the word expensive, it's relative. If you look at just the costs on LinkedIn compared to other platforms, those front end costs, we see averages of $8 to $14 cost per click in North America. And certainly that's going to be significantly higher than other platforms, you might be paying $3 to $5 per click on Facebook friends, but you do have to put this into perspective. Because with other media, you're casting a really wide net in hopes that your ideal target audience may represent part of where that net lands. But with LinkedIn, we get to be so specific about our targeting, that we make sure only our ideal customers are getting hit with our ads. So you're really just shifting the costs. Like on Facebook, you're going to pay less per click, but reaching a lot more people who aren't qualified as part of your ideal audience. On LinkedIn, we're paying a higher rate for them to reach only the ones who matter. And we see this time and time again, when you start looking at the way that LinkedIn leads translate into your CRM. We see that even though the costs per click are three to five times higher on LinkedIn than they are on something like Facebook, when you start calculating your cost per sales qualified lead, on the back end, we regularly see that the cost per sales qualified lead from LinkedIn is half that of Facebook. So we pay a premium to have much less waste. Of course, the platform really is truly expensive compared to others. And it's possible that your business may have been priced out of the market from using LinkedIn Ads, just because those front end costs are so high. So if you can't show an ROI, then yes, I agree with this myth. But otherwise, especially compared to other platforms, LinkedIn is not too expensive. And we see evidence of this because costs have been rising. When I very first started the podcast, the average costs per click on LinkedIn were like $6 to $8 in North America. And they've kept rising more and more, not because LinkedIn is arbitrarily raising prices, but because more and more advertisers are finding value, and they flock to the platform and competition has those costs per click rising. I'll also remind you that back in 2008, when the LinkedIn platform launched, the floor bid for LinkedIn ads was $2. And even at the time, I heard a lot of advertisers still saying that LinkedIn CPCs, were too high, even back when they were $2. And now we're like $8 to $14, on average. So if you're just getting started with LinkedIn Ads, I would recommend a starting budget of at least $5,000. And realize that those front end costs are going to be more expensive, but on the back end, because the lead quality is so much better, they tend to be cheaper. So watch your leads all the way through the funnel. Episode 71 was all about that so make sure you go back and listen to episode 71, on how to actually track those leads all the way through the sales funnel. And there are certainly ways of bringing costs down on LinkedIn. Some of the cool tricks that we've used are sending traffic to your website or landing page with LinkedIn so you know the traffic is amazing and then retarget them with both Facebook and Google, which are fantastic technologies for staying in front of those prospects at really low costs. And I'd also recommend potentially using the LinkedIn Audience Network, because then you'll get reach all around the web and on certain apps for significantly lower costs than what you pay on just the LinkedIn network. Myth Number Two Alright, Myth number two, LinkedIn ads don't work. Well, if they didn't work, we wouldn't see the same level of adoption that we do. If you're listening to this podcast, you're obviously taking the LinkedIn Ads channel very seriously. And likely, you've seen a lot of good results. So you may not be the ones who are saying this myth. But we've definitely seen that if it's not working for you, you're probably doing it wrong, or you just got priced out of the market. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break. And then we'll dive into Myth number three, The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. 7:54 If you're a B2B company and care about getting more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, then chances are LinkedIn Ads are for you. But the platform isn't easy to use, and can be painfully expensive on the front end. At B2Linked, we've cracked the code to maximizing ROI while minimizing costs. Our methodology includes building and executing LinkedIn Ad strategies, customized to your unique needs, and tailored to the way B2B customers buy today. Over the last 11 years, we've worked with some of the largest LinkedIn advertisers in the world and spent over $150 million on the platform. We're also official LinkedIn partners. So if you want to generate more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, book a discovery call with us at B2linkedin.com/apply. And we'd absolutely love the opportunity to get to work with you. Myth Number Three Alright, let's jump into Myth number three about audience sizes, you've likely heard that LinkedIn audience sizes need to be over 300,000. We hear this from LinkedIn reps all the time. And if you haven't listened to it, I would invite you to listen to episode 20 of this podcast, all about audience sizes. But what we suggest is audience sizes between 20,000 to 80,000, we find under about 20,000 audiences are so small, it's really hard to get them to spend at all. And so you really can't run much of a test. But as soon as audiences get over about 80,000, there tends to be something about that audience that we could then split it in half to learn something about how those audiences react, we call this micro segmentation. So for instance, if you're advertising to marketing decision makers, that could just be one campaign that is, let's say, job function of marketing with seniority of VP and above. But instead, we would split that audience up into two separate campaigns, one of just Marketing VPs and the other one of just marketing C level, so CMOS. If your LinkedIn rep sees it, they're probably going to tell you that your audience sizes are too small, and you need to combine audiences. When I've heard this argument in the past, it seems like they think that big because an audience size is smaller, that you're not going to spend the whole budget. But realize that when you start micro segmenting, you're still reaching your entire total addressable market, you're just breaking them up into smaller buckets. Whether it's one campaign or eight campaigns, you're still reaching the same audience. You're just segmenting them smaller so that you can learn from them. And learning more about your audiences and their behavior, that's just getting better data. Plus, I've also found that by micro segmenting, it allows me to systematically approach targeting, so that I don't leave anyone for my target audience out. Myth Number Four Okay, myth number four. If you aren't bidding high in the range, the suggested bid range, you're scraping the bottom of the barrel. I've heard this from LinkedIn reps who they look at the bid range. And let's say we're bidding $12, but the suggested bid ranges like $14 to $30, they'll tell us that if you're not bidding high enough, you're not reaching the highest quality of people within that audience. Well, this is definitely a myth, because we've run several tests on lead quality based on bid price and every time we came to the same conclusion, that bidding higher did not result in leads of higher lead quality. All it did was just increase the cost per plus, if your targeting is on point, then whatever traffic you get will be qualified. So I think that just means that we should do a better job of targeting if our lead quality is low. So to reiterate, I have found no evidence to support the concept of higher bidding, bringing higher quality leads. And I've had a couple LinkedIn reps separately come and argue about this. And I've asked them to bring me proof that they've seen the higher bidding results in higher quality clicks, and neither have so please, if you have this evidence, bring it on. The way that we view manual bidding, your bids are essentially a control on the amount of volume that you want. If your ad performance is great, you can afford to bid lower and still get all the impressions and clicks that you need. But if your ad performance is poor, meaning you probably have lower click through rates, you might need to bid higher to get more volume. But you still may not have to bid as high as LinkedIn recommends. Remember, you just need to bid high enough to fill your budget during the day. So if you have a huge budget, you may have to bid significantly above the range that LinkedIn recommends. 12:18 Myth Number Five Myth number five, audience expansion should be used always. On several occasions, I've had internal LinkedIn employees tell me that audience expansion should be used on all campaigns, and they just don't understand why I make the recommendation to always shut it off. Their reasoning tends to be that we can't always know whether we're targeting everyone in the buying committee, or even everyone just in our target audience. They also argue that it creates awareness because you're expanding your reach to those who aren't currently in the market. And our response to that is it's not about being in market or not. What audience expansion does is it expands your reach to those outside of your ideal customer persona period. And if you're being thoughtful about targeting, and you use different targeting methods, and you can always expand into lower senorities or larger companies, or even those who might later graduate into your target audience. You can do that thoughtfully, you don't need to leave it up to chance by clicking the audience expansion box. When you turn on audience expansion, you lose complete control over who your ads are shown to. It's definitely not about generating awareness or expanding your reach to the buying committee. It's about retaining control to expand your reach thoughtfully and strategically, that you'd want to show your ads to 13:33 Myth Number Six Myth number six, you shouldn't touch your campaigns for 30 days. We've heard this on several occasions that you really need to be hands off until campaigns accrue data. You need to understand that LinkedIn Ad learning period is usually about one to one and a half days. So if you're running something for three to four days, and it's spending at a pretty good clip, if performance is terrible, you really can shut it off or pivot right then. Chances are that trends are going to continue. So don't feel like you have to spend thoughtlessly on something that doesn't work for 30 days, just because you've been told you need to give it more time. Those front end metrics do generate pretty quickly. So even though advertising does take time to see results, you don't need to wait that long to see general patterns or trends. All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around 14:32 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 14:43 All right, we covered the new audiences feature, the document ads feature, the new media library, and the certified LinkedIn marketing experts program. Those links are all down in the show notes. Also, if you haven't already listened to Episode 71 about how to ascertain your Your LinkedIn ads ROI, definitely listened to Episode 71. That's also linked to in the show notes. If you or anyone that you know is looking to learn more about LinkedIn ads, I highly recommend the course that I did with LinkedIn Learning. It's linked in the show notes below and it is by far the most detailed and the least expensive course out there. If this is your first time listening, welcome, and definitely hit that subscribe button if you found this to be useful. And if this is not your first time, please do rate and review the podcast. It's a terrific no cost way of supporting us with any thoughts questions or feedback for the show, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiative!

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Calculating ROI on your LinkedIn Ads Post from AJ about square images Revenue.io Ads Examples Optimizely Ads Examples Accenture Ads Examples Nancy Harhut - Speaks a lot about marketing psychology NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Youtube Channel Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review!   Show Transcript What imagery performs best on LinkedIn Ads? We're diving deep 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! One of the topics I get the most questions about on LinkedIn Ads is about creative, specifically the imagery. What kind of imagery works? What sizes do you include? What about the subject of the imagery itself? These are all fantastic questions. And again, we're diving deep. You're about to become a master of LinkedIn Ads creative. First in the news, if you're not already subscribed to our YouTube channel, we just released an example analysis from Episode 71 that was all about how to use your CRM for reporting. And it's beefy, it walks you through all the way from the beginning using real data and showing you every step of the way within Excel. So I would highly recommend go check that out and make sure that you can do that sort of reporting in your sleep. Okay, now on to the topic at hand, let's hit it. What makes great LinkedIn Ads creative. Let's talk first about the sizes. When LinkedIn sponsored content first came out back in 2013, the size of imagery, it was all horizontal, and it was 1200 pixels wide by 627 pixels tall. And what's funny about that number is because Facebook was always 1200 by 628, so one pixel taller. And this wasn't that bad, because we could always use Facebook imagery interchangeably because that difference of one pixel didn't make any difference really at all. But now LinkedIn has finally standardized on 1200 by 628. So it's the same size as Facebook's horizontal, although I'm guessing not many people are using Facebook's horizontal images anymore. And then fairly recently, LinkedIn started supporting square and vertical imagery. So if you want to use square, which we highly recommend, and I'll explain why here in a moment, you want to use 1200 by 1200 pixel, at least. You may also want to run vertical, and vertical is just the inverse of your horizontal, it's 628 pixels wide by 1200 pixels tall. And one really interesting thing about running vertical creative is it's only eligible to be shown on mobile devices. So if your goal is to be shown only on mobile and not on desktop, run vertical creative, it works. If you want to run carousel imagery, each of those panes in your carousel, you want to make 1080 by 1080. Text ads back in the day, back in like 2008, they used to be 50 pixels by 50 pixels. They ran a little while with 75 by 75. But now they've standardized on 100 by 100 pixels. And then for message ads or conversation ads. And this is optional, but if you want to use that ad space, the banner imagery in the upper right hand corner, which again, I highly recommend you might as well use it. It's 300 pixels wide by 250 tall, which happens to be the same size as the optional background on spotlight ads. These are one of LinkedIn's dynamic ads. Again, this is optional. So on the subject of square imagery, we just recently put a post out on our company page about square imagery. And it was really fun. We used a meme from Malcolm in the Middle, and it's called the future is now old man, I love that meme. Thank you to Eric Jones on our team for pointing that out. And we pointed out how in all of our tests, square imagery tends to perform better than horizontal. Then Paul Fairbrother, who's one of my connections, he commented and said, I ran a test on square versus landscape images for a lead gen campaign using square images, doubled the CTR and caused the cost per lead to literally get cut in half. I hate the one quick tip doubled your results type of headlines. But in this case, one simple change to the image format really did double the results. By the way, I had been running the landscape images for a while before switching to square so this was based on 1000s of dollars of ad spend. So should be statistically significant. Then Bram Pullens, whose Social Lead at Heineken said, "Square image all day every day." And Praveen Vadla, he commented and said, "Yes, it works, you will increase your CTR for these ads." In one of these tests we found and this is with statistical significance, that square performed 15% better to the click through rate. And if you haven't listened to Episode 59 all about click through rate, go back and listen to that, you'll immediately understand why it's such a boon to be able to just pull higher click through rates out of nowhere, it helps your cost and helps your deliverability. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break and then we'll dive into what kind of imagery works best. The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts 4:49 If you're a B2B company and care about getting more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, then chances are LinkedIn ads are for you. But the platform isn't easy to use and can be painfully expensive on the front end. At B2Linked, we've cracked the code to maximizing ROI while minimizing costs. Our methodology includes building and executing LinkedIn Ad strategies that are customized to your unique needs and tailored to the way that B2B consumers buy today. Over the last 11 years, we've worked with some of the largest LinkedIn advertisers in the world, we've spent over $150 million on the platform, and we're official LinkedIn partners. So if you want to generate more sales opportunities, with your ideal prospects, book a discovery call today at B2linkedin.com/apply, we would absolutely love the chance to get to work with you. All right, let's jump into the types of imagery that work well on LinkedIn ads. So first, I think we have to talk about the subject of the image, what do you put in your image, because so many people, if you're SAS software, or really any other industry that's not selling something physical that you can hold, and you can show a picture of, then it is really difficult to figure out, okay, I have this thing that doesn't really exist, what kind of picture do I put in an ad to show it off. One that we found works so well, is faces or people, and I'm specifically saying this is photographic. This is real people, because Illustrated people don't tend to work as well. So Nancy Harhut, she runs an agency out of Boston. She's a friend of mine, and we speak at a lot of the same events. And she speaks a lot about marketing psychology. And I love what she's talked about in the past about including people in your ads, because she said, it creates human connection. We're especially drawn to the eyes. And we've leveraged this in a couple of ways in LinkedIn Ads, if we have a picture of a person who's making eye contact with the camera, that tends to perform pretty well. And the explanation I think Nancy talked about this, is that we as humans are programmed to look at faces for two reasons. It's either we want to know, Is this person a threat? Or can I mate with them. So because of that innate nuance, we can use that in our imagery. Have a face, especially with the eyes making contact with the camera. So we as members of LinkedIn are navigating our LinkedIn feed, and we see that, it's going to grab us, and we're going to be paying a little bit more attention to what the ad copy is going to say. Something else that Nancy has talked about, is having the subject of the image looking towards your call to action or where you want them to look, because we as humans, we're naturally looking where someone else is because I would imagine this is because we are always looking for danger. So we can get a clue about where danger is looking at where other people are looking. We had a client some time ago, they included an image in their ad of their CEO on stage, and his arm was extended. And it just so happened that it looked like he was pointing right to the call to action button. And this was an accident, but it caused the ad to perform so well, that we couldn't unseat it with another ad that could perform better. And this was months after it was first launched. So I can definitely attest to pointing or looking at a call to action being another great use of using people. You can do lifestyle imagery, so just pictures of outdoors or something else. But obviously it needs to be related somehow to your product or service. We found illustrations to work quite well, even going as far as comics. So for instance, I had a client back in 2014. And we included a comic accustomed drawn comic for their business in our ads, and they performed so well they got some of the highest click through rates that I've ever seen. Because so much of everything that's on LinkedIn is all buttoned up and professional. Having something like a comic that is traditionally not as related to business, it's really going to stand out. We even had a client a couple years ago, who they created a comic around their service. And it was really inventive, really cool. And we ran it through carousel ads. So each pane in the carousel was a different pane of the comic, and they could read it and digest it that way. Very cool. A lot of times when someone is pitching an ebook, or a guide, or a checklist or something like that, in their picture, they'll have a picture of a physical book. And the designer can just superimpose the first page or the title of it on this book. So the image, it looks like you're actually looking at a physical book, but in actuality, it's just an ebook. So it's a PDF somewhere, something like that can be great. If you're pitching and written asset. Screenshots of your product or screenshots of data, those kinds of things we've seen actually performed quite well, you wouldn't think so because they look a little bit boring. But I think when you see something that's a little hard to read, and you're interested in seeing what's there and what data is being shown, you're gonna lean in a little bit more and probably be a lot more likely to click. I also really like just simple graphics, maybe it's just a colored background with colored text on it. They tend to perform really well and they're so easy to create. You really need to know the main purpose of the images in your ads. The main purpose of your image is not to convert someone. No one's going to look at the image and immediately say, great, I'm ready to convert on whatever this is. The purpose of your image is to get someone to stop scrolling, we call it a thumb stopper. And you should and can test every kind of image out there. But it's helpful to understand it doesn't have to be high production value. It doesn't have to be super professional. Sometimes looking a little bit less professional, helps it look a little bit more organic, and it draws the eye a little bit more. Years ago, at another company, I bought billboard media, and radio and TV. And it was all really interesting, because my background was in digital, but I learned something really important from my billboard rep. She told me when we were talking about the words that go on the Billboard, to use seven or fewer words. And this is because when you're driving at high speed down the freeway, if something has seven or fewer words, you can pretty much get the gist of it without even taking your eyes off the road. But if it has more words than that, oh, man, you've got to take your eyes off the road. I think that's irresponsible to ask motorists to do that. And I've definitely found that to be successful with billboards. And so I've taken the same rule and moved it over to LinkedIn. I call this the billboard rule. In your imagery, tried to have seven words or fewer. And it's the same line of thinking that when someone's on LinkedIn, they're rarely there just for recreation, they're usually on their way to do something. And so you only have a split second to get their attention. But if you're following the billboard rule, whatever text you have on there, especially if it is relevant to them, and their career, you'll be able to get them to stop scrolling, it'll be that thumb stopper. I also got some really good advice from a designer once she told me that standing out, or sometimes we call it popping, is really all about contrast. And if you look at LinkedIn color palette, it's all blues, grays and whites, obviously, unless the user is in dark mode, but the main color palette for LinkedIn and same with Facebook is very much blue. And so if you want your imagery to contrast against what's on LinkedIn, and what's on Facebook. If you look at what artists call the color wheel, find blue and then look exactly opposite on the wheel, the opposite of blue is orange. So if you can saturate your imagery somehow, or include accent colors, or brand colors, whatever, in your imagery that is heavy in oranges, reds, greens, purples, that's going to stand out against most everything else that's in the feed. We've also noticed that a wide variety of imagery has worked. And so it's really difficult, I would love to give you like, here's the beat to length formula for imagery that works 100% every time. But because imagery is so subjective, we don't have that. And plus what works with imagery now may not work six months or a year from now, because user behavior changes and what we notice changes over time. I also want to mention that in testing, we haven't found imagery to really "move the needle". And what I mean by that is, if you're running an AB test, and you keep everything else the same, but you just vary the intro, or you just vary the image, or you just vary the headline down below, then you can measure the performance. And what we found is the intro, the text above the image, is almost always the most impactful element in the ad. Meaning that if I only have a limited amount of budget, or a limited amount of time, the AB test I'm going to put together is AB test the intros. The next most impactful element is the headline. We found that keeping intros the same but testing the headline, that can have a little bit of an impact as well. And then I'll say very, very rarely have we ever tested images, where one image super increase the click through rate compared to another. We have seen that with the sizes of images. So like having one running that's rectangle and one that square we've noticed higher click through rates on the square. But as for running two images, let's say one of them is a picture of an ebook and another as a person. Very rarely does that actually sway our performance. I will say I have seen it occasionally, where the image does play a big difference. One that I was doing for a big SAS company, this is several years ago, they had an illustrated picture of a person and they were holding a trophy with their hand up and cheering. And every single ad no matter what I tested, I could not unseat that image. The audience really liked that one. It swayed click through rates significantly, but that is very much a rarity. I would love to hear from you guys. If you've ever had your imagery really sway performance one way or another. I really view imagery like a binary. So unless you do it really badly, you kind of can't screw it up. If your imagery super blends into the background, and no one even looks at the ads, it doesn't matter what you have written as your intro, no one's going to be reading that so of course you're gonna get a really low click through rate. If you have an image that's decent at getting someone's attention so people are going to look over and read what you have as your intro, then there will probably be very little difference in the performance between your creatives. I get asked fairly often who does a good job at creative? Who can we look to for good ad examples? Well, in last week's episode with Alex Rynne from LinkedIn, she shared several that were really, really good. One of my favorites is Revenue.io. In the show notes below, I've linked to the company pages, where you can see some of the ads that some of these companies have run. But I'll walk you through four of these brands specifically and what we really like about them. First off with revenue.io, you'll notice that in their imagery, there's a lot of variety. And they rely very heavily on their purple brand color, which like we talked about, it's divergent from blue. So that purple really does help it stand out, you don't see a whole lot of purple on LinkedIn right now. Alex mentioned Optimizely was doing a good job so we went look at Optimizely's ads, and most of them look like they were built very simply in something like Canva, there's not a huge amount of production value, which I think is great. Anything that we as advertisers can get more efficient on or take less time doing is great. And so if you can have something that was built very quickly in Canva, outperform something that was designed by a professional designer in Photoshop. That's amazing. Next, Alex mentioned Accenture. So we went and looked at Accenture's and they have a lot of professional video, really high production value. And they also use a large variety of post types. So there's a bunch of good examples in there of carousel ads and video ads, go check them out. The last example I want to share is Adobe. If you look at their ads, it immediately becomes apparent that they have professional designers, which makes perfect sense because Adobe owns Photoshop. So of course, all of that imagery was created in Photoshop. They use a ton of bright colors and effects and shapes, lots of visual eyecandy, which is exactly what you'd expect from Adobe. So there you have it, you are now masters of the ad creative process on LinkedIn. So I hope you all go out and create ads now that are getting two to three times the click through rates. You're welcome. I 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. 17:36 So the resources that we talked about during the episode, we have the YouTube video all about how to calculate your ROI on LinkedIn that we mentioned back in episode 71. So make sure you go watch that, because I take you through all of my processes for how to create great reports in Excel. And if you're already good at Excel, you could probably watch it at like two times speed, but it's ultra valuable information. So I can't stress enough, make sure you go watch that. In the show notes. You'll also see a link to the post that we did about square images on the B2Linked company page. If you're not already following us there, go follow us we were putting out good stuff every week. You'll also see links to the ads for Revenue.io, Optimizely, Accenture, and Adobe are examples there. And Nancy Harhut has the marketing psychologist, we put a link to her profile on LinkedIn so you can follow her. She's always putting out great stuff. If you or anyone you know, is trying to learn more about LinkedIn Ads or get started, point them towards the course you'll see the link down below and it's the one that I did with LinkedIn Learning. It's extremely low cost, and it's one of the best quality courses out there. If this is the first time you've heard us, first of all, let me welcome you and invite you to look down and hit that subscribe button. If this is not your first time listening. Thanks for coming back. And I'll tell you this, a great no cost way to support us would be to look down in your podcast player right now and hit rate. Of course, we want you to be honest, if we do a five star job, then great, but especially those reviews are really what fueled the podcast. So please do review us. If you're not already following us on YouTube, go follow us there, there's a link to that. And currently, we're releasing a whole bunch of walkthroughs and tutorials on how to do really intricate reports in Excel for LinkedIn Ads. With any questions, suggestions, feedback, hit us up at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. We're cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: LinkedIn Collective Introducing the LinkedIn Collective: A New Community for B2B Marketers Growth on LinkedIn isn't slowing down Building an iconic brand Alex Rynne on LinkedIn NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.   Show Transcript AJ Wilcox 0:00 The LinkedIn Collective, it's a new community that you need to be part of. Here to introduce it as a friend of mine at LinkedIn, Alex Rynne, on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Speaker 4 0:15 Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. AJ Wilcox 0:24 Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! I'm excited to share this interview with you. Alex Rynne from LinkedIn came onto the show to talk about what she's working on, and what she's building inside of LinkedIn's marketing solutions. She has been so instrumental for so many years creating content to help us marketers there internally. And we're going to cover this new community that she's working on, the LinkedIn Collective, as well as insights that she has from internal about which B2B brands are doing the best job of creativity, which I get asked about a lot, as well as tons of insights into LinkedIn's platform growth. So without further ado, let's jump into the interview. AJ Wilcox 1:00 I'm so excited to have Alex Rynne here on the show. Alex is a senior Content Marketing Manager at LinkedIn. I think Alex, you and I go way back. We've gotten to hang out a couple times in San Francisco back when that was a thing, hanging out in person. And I've loved watching your progression there in LinkedIn. I don't know what the structure there looks like for evangelist, but I would call you like the LinkedIn Marketing Solutions Evangelist if I got to give you a title. But, welcome so much to the show. Thanks so much for being on and great to have you here. Alex Rynne 1:29 Thank you so much, AJ, appreciate you having me on. And I appreciate the evangelist title. I'm going to put that on my next review. AJ Wilcox 1:37 You definitely should. Alex Rynne 1:39 So yeah, I've been with LinkedIn for eight years now, all on marketing solutions the entire time. So I've been creating content for marketers, who are reading marketers, B2B marketers, of how best to use our products. And we started create, like back in the Jason Miller days when we were creating content around how to market on LinkedIn. And these books had never been created before ebooks. These are the days of like 100 page ebooks. We don't do that anymore, because no one has time to sit down and read any book that long. But anyway, my career path has kind of grown in a way that now I'm creating a lot of thought leadership content. So we're at top of the funnel unless it like the super tactical stuff. AJ Wilcox 2:20 Oh, that's socool. I love that being your role of being your focus. I do remember the old Jason Miller days where it was create one giant pillar of content. And it was great. I loved downloading those reports. But I have to imagine the 1000s of dollars that went into creating each of those reports. Alex Rynne 2:34 Oh, think about the the lowly editor me having to edit through all of those hundreds of pages. That's who you should really be thinking about. Those were really good days, his whole like big rock concept of creating one really large piece of content and picking off little pieces and keeping the drumbeat going, which is still something that we use in part today. AJ Wilcox 2:53 Do you still think there's a lot of value in that strategy, but maybe not the same way that the editor has to go through and edit 70 pages of the content? Alex Rynne 3:01 Yeah, there's definitely still value in that concept today. It's something that we do right now. Because if you put out one piece of content, you kind of naive to think that your entire audience has seen it like you should be spending, you know, like 20% of your time creating content, 80% of your time distributing content, because if no one sees it, then what's the point? So yeah, I do think there's a lot of value in picking what like category entry points you want to own as a brand. And then keeping the drumbeat going on those and trying not to like over saturate on one topic in particular. AJ Wilcox 3:32 Yeah, makes perfect sense. So when we were talking before about an episode, you told me about something really cool that you're working on right now the LinkedIn Collective? First of all, I'd love to know what the LinkedIn Collective is how US B2B marketers, or how any marketer is going to get value out of it. And I'd love to hear the backstory. I don't want to overload you with too many questions, but love to hear the backstory of how it all came about, and what the overall vision for it is. So tell us all about your baby here. That's so amazing. Alex Rynne 3:57 Absolutely. Thanks for asking. Yeah, the LinkedIn Collective is a brand new community for marketers, B2B marketers specifically, because we figured it's about time that we had a place of our own. And we also feel like B2B is really having a moment. And we saw firsthand at Cannes Lions back in June, when we celebrated the first ever creative B2B lions that were just we're having a renaissance. And we're in the middle of redefining what B2B marketing should look like. And with 82% of B2B marketers, globally, believing that creative confidence is growing, we feel like this is only the beginning. So the point of it is really to amplify the voices of B2B marketers, and rally behind their thought leadership. That's really the driving force behind it. AJ Wilcox 4:42 And I think this is so important, because I'm assuming you feel the same way. I kind of grew up in digital marketing in the days of Google ads, where Google just couldn't give two craps honestly about B2B Because it wasn't as keyword driven. They catered more to B2C, and then Facebook came in and did exactly the same thing. It was like oh, B2C works really well. here. And so B2B marketers, not only did we not get tools or platforms catering to us, but we got ignored. We weren't shared often like, tips, tricks, strategies, we had to figure it out ourselves. We were kind of thrown to the wolves. Alex Rynne 5:12 Exactly. And you kind of still see that a list or B2C stuff B list or B2B stuff. And what I mean by that is, it's like, what can we learn from B2C? And that's all great, but I think what we're doing with the collective is like, what can we learn from the best in B2B? How can we like push and evolve the category further instead of focusing on the A listers and less believing we are the B listers, because we're not. AJ Wilcox 5:36 You know, in fact, I've always been a fan of B2B because we have the large deal sizes. Yeah, when we're good at our job, people make millions when B2C marketers are good at their jobs, lots of times they're making hundreds or 1000s. I'm really proud of B2B marketers. I think we've stepped it up. Yeah, communities like yours are going to help us step up even more. Alex Rynne 5:55 Exactly, yeah, the first campaign that came out of the new content franchise, I guess, I'll call it is around creativity and B2B. Obviously, we had a lot of synergy happening within the company with our first ever B2B creative and B2B award. And one of the things we found is that most B2B businesses are overly focused on performance marketing, ie lead generation, resulting in the deprioritization of creative advertising, which is not shocking. And nearly 80% of B2B marketing budgets are spent on performance marketing or lead generation. But kind of what I'm seeing is the issue with that is that we're deprioritizing human marketing. And we're not prioritizing creativity, which we found that brands with higher emotional engagement, on average acquired like 198x more followers compared to the rest of companies. And we also found that emotion really impacts the lower funnel. So like top emotional brands had up to 44% higher average click through rate compared to the rest of the companies on LinkedIn. So creativity is really important. Emotion is really important. And so one of the things that we're going to really drive home in our next topic around measurement is that brand is really the new performance marketing, especially when we're in the middle of an economic downturn, you should be doubling down on your brand. I feel like most brands, they don't think about the long term growth that you're gonna see with brand marketing, they just want to release all of them. And it's the bottom of the funnel, it's like a worry tactic, rather than a tactic that's going to help them grow their brand over time. Another thing that you can do in the middle of a recession is like releveraging old creative, and then using that extra money that you would have spent on new creative, releveraging old creative that was successful, and then using that money to distribute. AJ Wilcox 7:43 Oh, I love that as a tactic. Not necessarily cannibalize, but go back and get more use out of what you've already created in the past. Alex Rynne 7:50 Absolutely. I think a lot of brands think that they have to continually recreate and renew, but not necessarily. I mean, we go back and update a lot of our like, greatest hits, as we call them all the time. And we've just like, update them with more relevant data, or maybe like, put a new like photo on it or something. But you don't even have to do that you can just like reuse the stuff that was working before. I did want to talk about some things that we found that advertising characteristics that work better in economic downturn. So things that we found that perform slightly better are ads using established brand characters or campaign scenarios, ads showing human connection. And between this or exhibiting some kind of self awareness, or ads with a connection to a place or community and ad set in the past. So kind of like that nostalgia. And then there were certain tactics or characteristics of advertising that perform slightly well and like a point of crisis or recession. And that's hard sell ads directly focusing on price and promotions. Like I was talking about before, dumping all your budget in lead gen when you really need to be building your brand and building your trust and your goodwill with your customer base. Other things that didn't perform super well, ads focusing on things over people, ads that are highly rhythmic ads that are reliant on on screen words and ads that indulge in vanity. So not like me, those are shocking, but just like things to keep in mind, especially when people are feeling ultra sensitive about their lives about their wallets, just to keep in mind, AJ Wilcox 9:22 Ooh, do you have a definition for rhythmic? Like, what's an example of a campaign that would feel rhythmic. Alex Rynne 9:27 I think like something that's super repetitive, but it doesn't really have much substance. It's a little bit like in your face. AJ Wilcox 9:34 So we've seen clients even when recently, where they have very established brand guidelines for how they want their creative to look. And what that means is every time a new asset comes out or we refresh ads, they still look pretty similar. And we're noticing click through rates dropping over time and our hypothesis and this is why I'm asking you about rhythmic. Our hypothesis is that like, even though they technically look different, and it's a new ad set, like a lot of people might be looking at it and getting a view and going, oh, I've already seen that before, because it's a visual trigger. But I could also see saying the same thing over and over or just saturating. It's not working very well. Alex Rynne 10:11 Yeah, I think there's a lot of different ways that you can kind of like reskin something, but you're right, if someone's just seeing the same graphic, again, associated with like, some infographic that you're continually updating, they might just do like a quick glance in the feed and be like, oh, I already saw that. So I think reinvesting what you have is good. But yes, sometimes you do have to make like slight changes. AJ Wilcox 10:33 Beautiful. Okay, so you gave us some characteristics of things that do work well, during a recession, and then some things to avoid anything else you want to share with us, as we're preparing for a potential recession here, that is going to impact B2B marketers? Alex Rynne 10:47 Yeah, I would say, don't sleep on organic. I think a lot of marketers think that it's like, brand versus demand. And it's not, it's an integrated strategy that's going to produce healthier results for you. So it's about like how you employ brand and demand marketing at different times within your growth strategy. So for example, we found that organic audiences are super ripe to be converted to paid media, that actually page followers exposed organic and paid were 61% more likely to convert towards a paid action, compared to those only exposed to paid media. So like, super interesting, because the organic is still very, very important. It's part of that like relationship building before they see the paid media. And then we also found that an integrated strategy encourages conversation. So an organic and paid strategy, we found can lift conversions by 14%, compared to a paid only strategy. And then finally, it also can reduce your cost per conversion, because unlike a paid only strategy, members were exposed to organic and PPE that can be converted at up to a 12% lower cost per conversion. So this was all research that we did last year when we made a whole campaign around like connecting your brand to demand and examples of good brands to demand. So yeah, anyway, I would say just don't sleep on organic. And I also would say, beware of measuring too quickly. Like I think, as B2B marketers, we fall into a trap of measuring a campaign over just after one month to like, see if we need to turn it off. Or if we need to change things, or whatever. And a sales cycle in B2B is like six months. So not many B2B marketers are measuring after a month, which means that we're really missing out on getting statistically significant data around like what our customer base is interacting with. And then maybe like reporting up to the CFO, that we're not seeing any lead gen from our ads, and then you turn them off on LinkedIn, you know what I mean? So I think just being really cautious about not measuring too quickly before you make any huge changes, AJ Wilcox 13:01 We've definitely seen that because we track everything all the way down through the sales funnel with our clients. And we had one where leads looked okay, cost per lead was okay, at the top end. But we had another offer that was way outperforming it. So we just kind of paused all those ads and kept moving. And we came back four or five months later. And all of a sudden we start seeing oh, those old campaigns now that they've matured a little bit, they had a really low cost per SQL. Maybe even a closed deal or two, we're going oh, okay, there was some gold back there, you have to revive it. So it's true, you really can miss stuff if you cut it off too early. Alex Rynne 13:38 Yeah, if you're following the wrong metrics, you could just go down a rabbit hole, that's not good for your brand. AJ Wilcox 13:44 So true. I also really love what you said about don't sleep on organic, especially on a platform like LinkedIn where organic is so incredibly powerful. There isn't that kind of reach on the other platforms. But with LinkedIn, I've been quoted as saying, "LinkedIn is the easiest network in the world to go viral on" all because it's like you share valuable stuff that makes people want to engage, and LinkedIn is going to keep sharing it and help it go viral. If you could ask me, of all the networks, which one would you want to go viral on LinkedIn, the network where I'm gonna make money, whereas if I go viral on Tiktok, or Facebook, maybe I get some credibility with friends, but I don't get the money. Alex Rynne 14:21 Yeah, I don't have the dance moves to go viral on Tik Tok, unfortunately, but maybe one day, I can hope I actually feel really old now. When I go on Tik Tok. I'm just like, these girls are 15? Do you know what I looked like when I was 15? Like, I had braces and like, I don't know. It's just funny. But yeah, Tik Tok is probably not my platform. AJ Wilcox 14:41 Me neither. I don't look good in a swimsuit. Alex Rynne 14:42 Yes, you do! So yeah, if those stats don't convince you that organic is valuable. I think it's also worth noting that it's the way that we use a lot of organic on our channels as testbeds for what we want to put paid behind, or what we want to create bigger campaigns around. You know what I mean? So if we post a blog post around like, last year I did a post around B2B isn't boring, it's brilliant. And provided all these examples of like, brilliant B2B campaigns. And that was one of our top performers of the year. So it's like, okay, and that's just looking at blog posts, looking at blog posts views, and like time on page. And so we're like, okay, let's take some of our top performers and create more synergy around the business around this, and work with our insights team to find more data around this, and then create a larger campaign. So it can be pretty powerful in terms of like, what's resonating with your audience what you should spend more time talking about? AJ Wilcox 15:47 Oh, that's way cool. I think we've had brands in the past, who, like we talked to him about testing, and they're like, oh, we have budget for testing, go for it. And so we really get to pile up data very quickly, across the board, testing a whole bunch of different things. But we also have plenty of clients who say, if there's anything we can learn organically about where we should put our pay dollars and be that much more efficient. We want to I think that's great advice. Yeah. All right, we're gonna take a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive right back into Alex's interview, Speaker 4 16:17 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. AJ Wilcox 16:27 If you're a B2B company and care about getting more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, then chances are LinkedIn Ads are for you. But the platform isn't easy to use, and can be painfully expensive on the front end. Here at B2Linked, we've cracked the code to maximizing ROI, while minimizing costs. Our methodology includes building and executing LinkedIn ad strategies, customized to your unique needs, and tailor to the way that B2B consumers buy today. Over the last 11 years, we've worked with some of the largest LinkedIn advertisers in the world, we've spent $150 million on the platform, and we're official LinkedIn partners. If you want to generate more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, book a discovery call at B2linkedin.com/apply, we'd absolutely love to get to work with you. Alright, let's jump back into Alex's interview. AJ Wilcox 17:19 Let's talk about the growth of the platform from outside shore looks like the LinkedIn platform is growing incredibly, I'm seeing so many more people engaging in meaningful ways. And then from an ads perspective, I was just looking at Google Trends this morning of LinkedIn Ads, just how it's grown over the last year, it seems like growth is incredible. From internal, can you tell anything about LinkedIn growth? Alex Rynne 17:41 If I could rattle off stats all day that I'm like, very proud of. I mean, LinkedIn marketing solutions surpassed $5 billion in annual revenue for the first time in July 2022. The platform is definitely on fire. We have over 850 million members in over 200 countries and territories now. And in terms of like engagement, we've seen a 22% increase year over year, and the number of feed updates viewed in FY 21 versus FY 22. Video is also like not going anywhere. The number of scheduled LinkedIn live events has increased 176% year over year, and that was a stat from July 2022. And then content, I mean now we have newsletters. So we have 188 editors on the LinkedIn news team across 15 countries. We have 36,000 newsletters on LinkedIn, including ones from influencers like Melinda Gates, Arianna Huffington, and Richard Branson. And even publishers like the Economist. We have 85 million total newsletter subscriptions. So newsletters are like the hottest thing. If you're not getting on newsletters, I'd highly recommend it as a organic content play. And then you mentioned products. So what do I have on product. So conversion ads, we found conversion ads drive four times higher open rates and four times as much engagement compared to traditional emails. Conversation ads drive two times as much engagement compared to message ads and messages drive two times as much engagement compared to traditional email. And there's also LinkedIn Audience Network. So marketers can achieve up to nine times more monthly touch points to LinkedIn members who are more active on the LinkedIn Audience Network. So I know I just threw a lot of stats at you. I'm actually in the process of creating an infographic around it. That will be published on the blog on the LinkedIn ads blog within the next couple weeks. So just keep your eye on that. I have a lot more stats around. I can't remember off the top my head but like stuff about like trust. I mean, we've been rated three years in a row, the most trusted platform, I think that's really important for our audience to know that it's a trusted platform, and that we're not using your data for weird reasons. AJ Wilcox 19:51 I love that and I will say on newsletters, we launched our newsletter and had over 5500 subscribers just over the weekend, I don't know how long this push is going to last, when LinkedIn or any network comes out with a new feature, they tend to give it a lot of airtime to make sure that people know about it. We were definitely the beneficiary. But by now, I think we have more subscribers on our LinkedIn newsletter than we do like our internal newsletter, which is crazy. Alex Rynne 20:17 That's awesome. Congrats. AJ Wilcox 20:19 Thanks. I did forget to ask you about the LinkedIn Collective. I want to ask the same thing here. So you mentioned to follow the LinkedIn Marketing Solutions blog all share that link in the show notes. But for those interested in the LinkedIn Collective, what can we expect in terms of timing, and how do we follow it? And how do we find it? Any of that? AJ Wilcox 20:37 So yeah, I should have mentioned that it's a showcase page. So I'll give you the link AJ, so you can share it out. But if you also just go either onto LinkedIn and search LinkedIn collective, you'll find the showcase page, or it's an affiliate of the LinkedIn main page. So you can find it through that way as well. We really wanted to double down on investing on our own platform. So LinkedIn collective does not right now have like an outside blog. All of the information is on the showcase page within like articles and imagery. I'm actually launching LinkedIn collective live in November. It's kind of like a rebrand our Live with Marketer series that I hosted for all those years. So we're continuing that strategy, but revamping it so that it's more aligned with the certain themes that we want to pursue within LinkedIn collective live. So yeah, that's where you can find it. You can expect the live show happening in November, that's going to be huge. Jim, our VP of Marketing, is going to host it. And it's going to be all about Ken all about our presence at Ken all about what we learned from our first year of hosting and award. We're so Jim's hosting. And we have EJ McNulty, who is executive creative director at Wunderman Thompson. And that was the agency that won the Grand Prix for B2B and creativity. And then we also have Chris Duffy, who was one of the can jurors. And he also does high level strategy at Adobe. So it's going to be a really interesting conference. It's going to be back in the studio, which I'm so excited about, because people are sick of seeing my shelves, whatever setup that I have going from someone's house. So yeah, it's gonna be awesome. And I will send you more info on that so that your podcast listeners can make sure they don't miss it if you want. AJ Wilcox 22:17 Right. Is that the studio in Mountain View? Alex Rynne 22:19 No, it's we have the brand new studio in San Francisco. I actually haven't even seen it yet. So when I fly up there, it'll be my first time seeing it. AJ Wilcox 22:27 Very cool. All right. So it's a showcase page, which means for everyone who wants to participate, make sure you go follow the page, I think you can ding the bell on a showcase page to make sure all this information is getting alerted to you right away. And I guess, tell me if you agree, I would say make sure like, be in there actively commenting. It's a community. It's not just a showcase page posted? AJ Wilcox 22:50 Yeah, exactly. It's meant to be a community and like, we chose the word collective because it's not just our team. It's not just our content team. It's an addition with other teams like so like the insights teams and the agency teams. And then in addition to that, it's collective voices within the industry. So like we've already had so many amazing, we're calling them collective contributors that are writing articles for the page, for example, like Kirsten Allegri Williams, who's the CMO of Optimizely, authored a piece around the art and science of creativity. We had Joe Kramer, who's the CMO at Accenture write a piece about the future of B2B marketing and when complexity meets craft. Also, Tom Stein, who is the chairman and chief growth officer at Stein IAS, they do a lot of really great work for B2B clients. So we've already had an amazing voices on the page, and we look forward to gathering and curating more with all of your help. AJ Wilcox 23:46 Great. So we need everyone who listens, make sure you go and follow the page right now. Don't wait. Right now. And I will put a link right to it in the show notes. Alex Rynne 23:57 Don't walk, run! AJ Wilcox 24:00 Alright, switching gears here, we're seeing a lot of advertisers right now talk about their demand generation strategy. And I see this active shift going from where it used to be very heavy lead generation, where it's all performance based to now more of a holistic brand awareness followed up by retargeting kind of strategy. What's your take on the shift that we're seeing? And what do you recommend for us LinkedIn ads professionals? Alex Rynne 24:23 Yeah, I mean, I talked a little bit before about how brand and demand need to kind of like work together rather than like one versus the other. But I think one of the main things that we realized as a team is that the funnel, as it stands right now, like this, like doesn't make as much sense. It's not as audience centric as we might think. It's more of internally how we organize ourselves to create content. Does that make sense? So like, it would make more sense if the funnel is kind of like flipped on its side, because the way that it is vertically, it's just like it's helping us organize Some things internally, but it's not very audience centric. So, yeah, I mean, I think we've been saying that brand is the new performance marketing. And you know, lead gen is obviously still important. It still has a place, but I think that lead gen begins with the top of the funnel organic stuff. Like it's all part of the journey. AJ Wilcox 25:18 Yeah, I totally agree. I think that's what we've seen. I liked that comment on flipping the funnel sideways, because it shows that when the funnel is vertical, it shows that gravity is kind of helping you. It's like you have a touch point and boom, they just fall naturally to the next step. When we know it's work. It's work to get someone on stage. And yeah, walking them sideways actually feels better than just letting gravity kind of play. Alex Rynne 25:41 Right? It's like more human, too. It's like, we're not just like squeezing a little drip drops out of a funnel. AJ Wilcox 25:46 Yeah, it's true. So going back to when you were talking about the award at Cannes Lions, and creativity in B2B, I actually get asked all the time, like who in B2B is doing a good job. I'm curious to hear your perspective, who is doing a really good job of creativity in B2B? Who in B2B is doing a good job of mimicking the principles we've learned from B2C? Any learnings that we as B2B marketers can take from it? Alex Rynne 26:13 Yeah, well, I have to say LinkedIn. No, I'm just kidding. No, I think I mean, I mentioned I think Optimizely does a great job. Accenture does a great job. Adobe is doing really cool things. IBM, I mean, Salesforce is an example that everyone uses. So I try not to use Salesforce as much, but Salesforce is definitely on the list as well, like their whole Trailblazers campaign, that was just like the perfect idea to create this little character that like everyone has all this affinity for, you know what I mean? Like, that's a great case study in how to like, build affinity and likability for your brand. AJ Wilcox 26:47 Yeah. And what I like about that character is it doesn't matter who leaves the company, or what that character they still own, and they can still keep using, it's a voice that they can leverage forever. Whereas if you have some kind of a another mascot, let's say it's a person, that person can die, they can move on. Alex Rynne 27:07 Way to take it to morbidtown! AJ Wilcox 27:09 Sorry about that. That's where I'm at right now. Alex Rynne 27:13 That's a really great point. Yeah, agreed. AJ Wilcox 27:16 Yeah, those are fantastic examples. I'm gonna go check them out, make sure I'm following and start sharing those as examples. When I'm asked to, I don't see very much creativity and B2B, honestly. Alex Rynne 27:26 Visa is another one. They're doing some cool stuff around the World Cup. What is called, World Cup? The soccer game? Yeah. Obviously, I'm very into sports. They are doing a lot of cool stuff around that. So if you go check them out, this whole department on our team is doing this whole case study on sports marketing, which is really cool because we've never produced anything like on that topic before. It's a very specific niche. AJ Wilcox 27:49 Yeah, you wouldn't think sports marketing going hand in hand with LinkedIn. But I do see LinkedIn has its hands in a lot of attention. I'm really eager to see how that turns out. Alex Rynne 27:58 Yeah, I mean, Kevin Durant's on the platform now. AJ Wilcox 28:01 Oh, that's cool. Yeah. All right. So last question for you, what are you most excited about either personally, or professionally? Or give us a little bit of both? Alex Rynne 28:09 Yeah, personally, as you know, I just got married. We just got married within like weeks of each other. So I'm just really excited about this next chapter of my life. I feel a lot more like settled and focused than I ever have been. So yeah, I'm really, really excited about everything that's to come with that. And then in terms of professionally, I'm just really excited to continue building this franchise. I mean, what we're realizing is that something of this magnitude that everyone that's creating content within LinkedIn marketing solutions, needs to contribute to and like align to, as we're gonna need a lot more people. So I'm excited about the growth of my team. I'm excited about the growth of the franchise. I'm excited about the live with strategy and to see like how far we can reach with the caliber of guests that we can get on the show. So yeah, and I'm excited to just hear back from folks within the industry of what they think about what we're doing. We've already heard a lot of great things around how people really appreciate the fact that we're trying to kind of like, push the envelope with B2B. And I think we should have probably pushed all of our chips into B2B completely a lot sooner. But here we are, we made it. AJ Wilcox 29:22 We are working on some awesome stuff. So excited to have you here on, finally. I've had you as a target guest for quite some time and now this is episode 74. So thanks for making it happen. Everyone, this is Alex Rynne, the Senior Content Marketing Manager at LinkedIn on LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. Thanks again for being here. And we'll make sure people are following you and reaching out for any feedback that they want to share. Alex Rynne 29:46 Thank you, AJ. Really appreciate your time and I hope that everyone learned something today. AJ Wilcox 29:51 All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around Speaker 4 30:01 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. AJ Wilcox 30:12 All right, like we talked about during the episode, the LinkedIn Collective, you can see the link right to the showcase page that Alex was talking about right there in the show notes. There's also an article introducing the LinkedIn collective, so you can read more about it, as well as a bunch of the stats that she was sharing about the growth of LinkedIn. We've got a link to a blog post detailing all of those. And she also shared an article with me before the show that I wanted to share with you guys all on building an iconic brand. If you or one of your colleagues are looking to learn more about LinkedIn Ads, have them check out the course that I did with LinkedIn Learning. The link is down below in the show notes. It is by far the highest quality, the best course out there for the lowest cost, so definitely check that out. If this is your first time listening, welcome, we're excited to have you here. Make sure to hit that subscribe button, if you want to hear more about LinkedIn ads every week in your podcast player. If you're already subscribed, a zero cost way that you can support us is to go ahead and leave a review for the podcast. Most are doing this with inside of Apple podcasts, but anywhere that you can leave a review, it would be greatly appreciated. With questions, feedback, anything about the show, email us at podcast at B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Detailed explanation of policies Ad Guidelines Ad Disapprovals Episode 72 - Quality Scores NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.   Show Transcript Have you ever had your LinkedIn Ads get disapproved for any reason? We're talking about ad guidelines and disapproval process 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! Every ad platform needs to protect itself legally from allowing the bad actors to advertise in a harmful way. They do this by having your ads go through some sort of an approval process. This helps the platform to prevent any harmful ads from running on its platform. And of course, the platform being held accountable for that. LinkedIn is certainly no different. All of its ads go through some sort of a review process. And review processes are understandably complex, they kind of have to be, and this is for every platform. So today, we're going to talk specifically about LinkedIn's. In the news, I wanted to let you know that a bunch of the members of my team were trying to run campaign reports inside of campaign manager to find the campaign quality score. And like we talked about in episode 72, there are a few reasons why your campaign might not be eligible to show its campaign quality score. But from what we could see, our campaigns weren't being held back by any of those reasons that would keep them from showing the quality score. So we reached out to LinkedIn and got a good response back. They said, "Our technical escalations and engineering teams have confirmed the issue. It's currently an issue that other advertisers are seeing as well. At this time, there's no estimate as to how long it might take to resolve, we'll do our best to provide progress updates as they become available." So I will do the same thing for you. When we hear back from LinkedIn. I'll let you know. Other news here. I actually got married, which is why you haven't heard from me in about the last three weeks. The wedding went amazing. We took a honeymoon cruise, we went down the Western Caribbean. And it was right during hurricane Ian the cruise was supposed to stop in Jamaica and the Cayman Islands, both I was really excited to see. But we didn't end up going we had to veer back towards Mexico and stay there while the hurricane was passing. So we did a couple stops in Mexico, it was still wonderful. I've got no complaints. Certainly happy to avoid any hurricanes while I'm on a floating petri dish. And a sincere thank you to everyone who messaged or emailed to say congratulations on the wedding. All right on to the topic at hand. Let's hit it. So back in 2011, when I first started using LinkedIn Ads, the ad review process used to be 100% manual. That means every single ad that was published a human it would go into a queue and a human would look at it and decide whether the ad needed to be approved or disapproved and they'd hit the button. And there were all kinds of mistakes, too. If you tried enough times, you could get to a reviewer who would either mistakenly hit the approve button when it should have been disapproved or vice versa. It was a little crazy. And because it was all human reviewed, the process would sometimes take up to three days to get an ad approve. Then probably five or six years ago, LinkedIn shifted some of the burden of the review team by allowing some ads to be conditionally approved, or, as we might say, automatically approved. And this is something they did and probably still do for what they call trusted accounts. And I'm not sure what signals to LinkedIn trust. Maybe a certain amount of history of the account, or a spend level, or a lack of complaints about your ads, or your credit card not ever going down. I don't know what the signals are, they could be any thing like that or other combinations. And if LinkedIn ever went back and found they didn't like the ads, even though they were conditionally or automatically approved, they could be disapproved later. Now, I'm not entirely certain about how it works now, but I would guess that there's now some help with machine learning involved on LinkedIn side to help find ads to disapprove. And then humans can handle appeals. There's probably still quite a bit of human involvement, but I wouldn't be surprised with LinkedIn being a tech company if there's not some ML or AI kinds of stuff going on there too. If you go into LinkedIn's Help section and search for the ad guidelines, you'll find a help article called Advertising Guidelines. It says it was last updated in 2021 Back in January, and this article has a great list of things that LinkedIn cares about reasons that they might want to disallow an ad from running. I'm going to read off some of the reasons that they might disapprove an ad and then give you a little bit of color if I've got some. 4:32 So the first is accuracy do not deceive or lie to the members. We found that this relates to claims that might be too good to be true. The next one is advertising text and contact information. Do not use non standard spelling, grammar, capitalization, punctuation, or repetition. You can include a single link and either a single email address or phone number. This is a little bit vague, but what we've found is they can disallow your ads, if you have too many symbols, or too many emojis, or even too many exclamation marks. This one's pretty self explanatory here, discrimination, even if legal in the applicable jurisdiction. LinkedIn does not allow ads that advocate, promote or contain discriminatory hiring practices, or denial of education, housing, or economic opportunity, blah, blah, blah, basically, don't leave anyone out. You can also see this from LinkedIn, not allowing you to exclude with some of the targeting. For instance, you can't exclude by group. And I think the thought there is if someone joins a group because of, let's say, a race, or sexual orientation or anything like that, they wouldn't want you to exclude that group, just to get rid of those people from your your targeting, which makes perfect sense to me, I get it and fully support it. Language. Don't use inappropriate or offensive language. And I have found that some swear words are allowed, but others aren't. So feel free to test or don't, I would advocate making the world a better place by keeping your language classy. But feel free to try it out. We've done some of that testing before. The next one link behavior. Don't deceive, confused or otherwise degrade the experience of members who click on your ads. Basically be a good advertiser, makes sense to me. This one's interesting, prohibited products. Do not advertise adult content, affiliate advertising, alcohol, copyrighted content, counterfeit goods, data collection and privacy. Not quite sure what they mean by that. Drugs and related products, fake documents, gambling, hacking and cracking, health matters, loans and financial services, occult pursuits, I had to look that up, hat's like tarot card reading and fortune tellers and witchery and all that opposition, I'm not quite sure what they mean by opposition, political or religious content - exceptions apply, scams, questionable downloads, tobacco, weapons, and fireworks. And it's interesting to me, cryptocurrency used to be on this list, at least I thought it was we used to get ads denied for anything around crypto around initial coin offerings, or basically anything that talks about Bitcoin, but it's not currently in this list. And this list was updated back in 2021. So we'll come back to that here in a minute. The next one, sensitive content. Don't advertise illegal products, dating sites, gambling, hate or violence, weapons, again, which are dually, excluded. Financial Status, I'm not quite sure what financial status sensitive content is. Maybe it's the Tai Lopez style, like this is me on my Lamborghini in my garage, multilevel marketing programs, so MLMs aren't allowed to advertise on LinkedIn. That's great to know, inflammatory, religious or political content, and more. And then finally, trademarks. Do not use trademarks you are not legally permitted to use. 7:52 So going back to crypto, this was really interesting to me, because I went to go look at another, this is actually a web page. Both of these are linked to in the show notes. And it's a whole website about LinkedIn Ads policies. And it's actually really great. And it's much more detailed than what I just read to you. It goes into a lot of examples and things about the reasons why things are disapproved and what's allowed and what's not. So if you get something disapproved, it's probably a really good idea to go and look at that, read in more detail and see how you can get back into compliance. What's interesting, though, is that the ads policy, it was last updated in December of 2020. So about a month before the ad guidelines I just shared with you, and it does mention cryptocurrency or anything related to crypto. So I'm curious to hear from you guys if anyone is actively advertising a lot of crypto, if you end up seeing issues with your ads always being disapproved. It might just be the in the ad guidelines, they forgot to list crypto, but under ads policy they did. Or maybe they used to disapprove it and then as of January of 2021, they now allow it. I'm not sure I'd love to hear from you guys on that. Here's a quick sponsor break and then we'll dive into the guidelines for your creative. The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. 9:13 If you're a B2B company and care about getting more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, well then chances are LinkedIn Ads are for you. But the platform isn't easy to use, and can be painfully expensive on the front end. At B2Linked, we've cracked the code to maximizing ROI while minimizing costs. Our methodology includes building and executing LinkedIn Ad strategies, customized to your unique needs, and tailored to the way B2B customers buy today. Over the last 11 years, we've worked with some of the largest LinkedIn advertisers in the world. We've spent over $150 million dollars on the platform, and we're official LinkedIn partners. If you want to generate more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, book a discovery call today at B2Linked.com/apply. We'd absolute love the opportunity to get to work with you. All right, let's jump into the things that you need to keep out of your ads to skirt disapproval. We've also linked in the show notes to the ad disapprovals document. But this one goes through the kinds of content in your ads themselves that will get you disapproved. So everything we've talked about before is basically been like, as a company and general industry and all that. This is the actual stuff in your ad that will get you disapproved. Use standard text, spelling and grammar, makes sense. Avoid excessive capitalization, other than valid acronyms, product names, or company names. Avoid emojis or contact information and this makes sense. If you ever tried to put like your call to action in all caps, like DOWNLOAD TODAY, they'll usually turn that ad down. And you are allowed to include a little bit of this, they just say avoid excessive use. They'll also turn you down. If you have pop ups, pop unders animated GIFs are unrelated hashtags. Now I'm guessing the animated GIFs thing is on the landing page itself. Because if you try to include an animated GIF, or even an animated ping, I've tried that before, as a single image ad, it's only going to show the first frame, it's not going to play like an animated GIF. So if you want to advertise using an animated GIF, you have to do it as a video ad. And videos will be accepted when they have animation. But pop ups, pop unders, those all seem to relate to the landing page that they would send you to and unrelated hashtags, my guess is that in the ad copy, but if you've heard me talk about it before, I don't recommend using hashtags in your ads, because you're essentially going to pay for someone to click when they're gonna go to content that you don't own. They say do not use LinkedIn in the ad copy or imply affiliation with or endorsement by LinkedIn. But your ad may use the phrase "Find me on LinkedIn". That makes it a little bit tougher for advertising agencies like us who just live on LinkedIn Ads, but okay. The next is test ads will not be approved. And I can tell you, I'm very glad that they don't allow test ads because something I used to do a lot when I would create a dummy campaign, the dummy campaign stayed in draft status until it had an ad. So then I would go in and put in something like this ad is a test or test test test or is something that I know the approvers are going to notice. And then they disapprove that ad so that the campaign can still be active with no active ads within it. So I don't have to worry about a test campaign spending money. Next, LinkedIn says In addition, ad content should include truthful claims, provide accurate pricing offers and discounts matching the landing page. And like we talked about in episode 72, about relevancy score, LinkedIn is obviously starting to take into account what's on the landing page. And they didn't used to, this shows a pretty extreme advance in technology on the ad platform. So I'm applauding LinkedIn for doing this. This one's a little rough. It says, ad creative and landing page language should match the audience language selected in campaign audience settings. This one's tough for those foreign advertisers who are trying to advertise in a language that LinkedIn doesn't officially support. And I totally feel for them on this. They just want to give LinkedIn their money, they want to advertise, but because LinkedIn doesn't have that languages capability, then their ads get disapproved. It really sucks. I would continue to call on LinkedIn to work on supporting those additional languages that their users have and want to advertise using. It seems really straightforward to just not disapprove someone's ads if they're in a different language, but I'll leave that to LinkedIn corporate to figure out. Here's some guidelines for ad landing pages. They have to include working links as URLs, and a functioning backbone. So you can't trap someone where the back button doesn't work. Include a consistent display and landing page URL. So basically, don't redirect someone when they click on your web page.com, don't immediately redirect them somewhere else. I can't imagine you would, it would slow down the experience, cause everyone to bounce before they even got to your landing page. But they obviously don't allow it. Provide clear billing practices that are fair, legal, and easily findable and include a privacy policy as applicable. Those of you who use LinkedIn lead generation forms, you know that a privacy policy is required for using those. That's the biggest source of my frustration in launching a new lead gen form campaign. They mentioned ad creatives are automatically submitted for review when a campaign is launched, or when an ad creative is edited. When a campaign is running. As a best practice, we recommend creating your campaign at least 48 hours in advance in case you need to edit your ad following a review. So as you'd expect, we've had quite a bit of experience with the ad appeals process. 14:48 So I talked to Eric Jones on our team, one of our directors, and I just asked him about the experience on LinkedIn. And he also has experience with Facebook and Google. So I wanted to share with you some of the points of what he talked walkabout. First he talked about how on Facebook and ad appeal process is near impossible. He said it's set up in a way that it should be easy, but they're way too large of an organization to ever dedicate a human to something. So all the appeals and all the disapprovals are done by computers and computers get things wrong sometimes. And then when you do appeal, there's no communication, you appeal and you wait, and the process can take days. So Eric said, LinkedIn is actually really good. You're working with real people. You get live email notifications when a case is being processed and reviewed. And he said, it's usually the day of, but worst case you hear back the next day. And they'll let you know in the email, usually what needs to be fixed. So if you have done something wrong, you can fix it. But if you feel like your ads were totally disapproved for a reason that doesn't make sense, you're almost always guaranteed to get it reactivated when you make your case. But if there is a little gray area, you may have to explain yourself better, and make a case for it. And if you use the guidelines that I've shared with you in the show notes below, you can actually quote the guidelines to them, which helps strengthen your case. But as a reminder, always be respectful and patient, because the reviewers are real people. Every once in a while, you'll get a response back about some reason that your ads were disapproved. And this is not LinkedIn only this is every network. And you might say, that's way too vague, I don't even know what you're talking about. I don't even know what took my site down. And so it's helpful to understand why they will give you something that is purposely very vague, large organizations like the ad platforms, they need to stay vague to keep bad actors from trying to reverse engineer and find ways around what they're doing. So when you don't get a very specific reason exactly why you broke a guideline, it's definitely not because the support professional is dumb, or doesn't understand the ads platform or doesn't understand marketing. They're just trying to protect themselves. 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. 17:14 So in the show notes, you'll find the three help articles that I used to find all this information. There's the detailed explanation site on linkedin.com/legal/ads-policy. There's the ad guidelines, and the ad disapprovals article. All three are worth bookmarking and referencing especially as you're trying to make a case for appeals if you get something disapproved that you don't think needed to be disapproved. Also, if you haven't already listened to Episode 72, all about relevancy score and quality scores, definitely make that one part of your list. And if you are any of your employees are looking to learn more about LinkedIn Ads, definitely check out the course that I made with LinkedIn Learning. It's by far the most in depth, the most accurate, and the least expensive course out there for LinkedIn Ads. LinkedIn Learning does a great job. Check that out, it's linked to in the show notes as well. If this is your first time listening, welcome, make sure to hit that subscribe button. And if this is not your first time, welcome back and realize I put a lot of effort and so does my team and to helping create these episodes. We don't ask you for anything. So please, please, please, the best way you can say thank you is by leaving a review, usually on Apple podcasts, but really anywhere that you have reviews available, we would love for you to shout us out. With feedback, suggestions, whatever you want to shout at us, hit us up at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Episode 59 LinkedIn's auction Campaign Quality Scores for Sponsored Content Help Article LI's Privacy Centric Explanations - really interesting to understand LI's direction towards privacy Episode Six NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.   Show Transcript I win auctions every day. No, I'm not an eBay addict. I'm a LinkedIn advertiser. We're talking about how to win the ad auction 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! LinkedIn's ad auction is confusing to advertisers because it's so opaque. And you don't quite know what's going on in the background. If you're looking to improve the performance of your ads, though, you'll definitely want to understand what's going on behind that curtain. So on today's episode, we're going to do a deep dive into the ad auction. First of all, some great stuff in the news. I found a resource that LinkedIn released called the professional identity resources for LinkedIn advertisers, I've gone ahead and link that down below in the show notes so you can check it out. But basically, it's a download of how LinkedIn is looking at, and thinking about privacy concerns. And it's really helpful to understand the direction that LinkedIn is moving with things like conversion tracking, and some of the things we've seen recently like with reach being taken away. So if that's interesting to you definitely go check that article out, there's quite a few things there. I was also able to attend the meeting for LinkedIn API partners and we got a bit of a roadmap update, which was really exciting. Usually, LinkedIn likes to keep their advances that are on the platform up to date with what's happening on the API as well. So if you happen to use LinkedIn API in any way, like if you're using a partner of LinkedIn, that helps you at all with what you're doing inside of campaign manager, then you might notice this kind of functionality coming out. What they talked about, that I got especially excited about were dynamic UTM parameters. And it looks like these are going to be available in LinkedIn API first, and then we'll eventually get them inside of the dashboard. So for those of you who are already advertising on Facebook, and you love how you can create the same ad once, but in every campaign, or every ad set that you run it in, you can have different UTM parameters running to it, we're eventually going to have that on LinkedIn as well. I'm a huge fan of this. I've been asking for it for years, they also talked about how offline conversions are coming. And I've got this inside of my campaign manager dashboard so it's available on the UI to me now, I don't know if it's available to everyone yet. But we know it's probably coming to the API soon. So you might be able to use a different partner program to help you with something like these tying offline conversions back to your adspend. 2:39 So let's talk about offline conversions. It's a little bit limited in the way that LinkedIn is doing it. But you'll understand why. Imagine that you're advertising and then one of your ads turns out later to generate a sale. What you can then do is send that list of email addresses of those people who've become your customer back to LinkedIn. And then LinkedIn will take that and match it up to that same user if they're able to find that same email address attached to a user and figure out which campaign which ad they initially clicked on. And then they'll be able to do that attribution. The obvious weakness here, though, is that LinkedIn knows personal email addresses, because that's how we log in and sign up for LinkedIn. And if you close a customer off of LinkedIn Ads, they're probably going to end up giving you their professional email. So let's say if LinkedIn only understands 50% of email addresses, that's still cool to have these offline conversions being tied up in the platform. So I'm excited about the functionality, but just realizing it's not going to be fully complete. There was also some new development around DMP segments coming out with the API. So that could end up being interesting. If there are those of you who are using DMPs. Going a different direction here. One of LinkedIn engineers reached out to me with a really interesting ask. She said, she's working on the accessibility features for campaign manager, and that she's searching for some LinkedIn users who might actually utilize those accessibility features. So maybe it's someone who is vision impaired. And they're using things like a screen reader, or utilizing the alt text of images, when either creating or consuming different ads. She would love to have a brief chat with them over zoom or over the phone and share some takeaways with their engineers as they're trying to make their accessibility features better. So I'm calling on all of you. Do you know anyone who builds ads who uses any of those accessibility features? Maybe because their vision impaired or for some other reason? If so, please reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com and I'd love to introduce you to Carol. We reported a few weeks ago that LinkedIn is now only reporting on some averages for reach and frequency. And we're no longer getting those accurate counts. It was done so suddenly that I think there was a lot of advertiser blowback. And so LinkedIn appears to have reverted this change, but the bad news is, it's likely still going to be averaged again in the future. But at least for now we have the raw numbers. So go ahead and use them for whatever they're worth. But know that we're probably going to lose them again soon here in the future. 5:13 I have a really cool announcement. I'm actually getting married this week. And so I'm very excited. It's gonna be fun. We're gonna go on a cruise for honeymoon. The bad news to you is that I may end up skipping a couple of weeks of episodes, but I promise I'll be back as soon as I can. I wanted to highlight a review that came in from Maggie Mulholland one of our friends, actually, who works at LinkedIn. She said, "Great resource! Such a time worthy listen for anyone in the industry. AJ brings an honest and well rounded take on all things LinkedIn." Maggie, thanks so much for sharing that. I do try really hard to have it be an honest and well rounded take. I do hope we're not ruffling any feathers at LinkedIn when we talk about some of the products the way that we do. But I also hope that the praise that we keep on the platform also comes across as intended as well. So thanks, Maggie, great to have you as a listener. 6:01 Alright, so now to the topic at hand about the LinkedIn ads auction, let's hit it. First, we have to ask ourselves, what is an auction. Put simply, LinkedIn has a limited number of ad impressions that it can show to any given user. And there are obviously quite a few companies who would love to show an ad to any of these users. So LinkedIn, just like all the other major ad platforms, especially like Google and Facebook, it holds an internal auction to decide which advertisers ad to show to any individual during the day. This was a concept that I believe was pioneered by Google early on with Google AdWords, that's now Google Ads. And it's a really genius way of maximizing the profit of any individual user on the platform. So let's talk about how it works. Let's say you and I both want to reach the same audience member on LinkedIn. And let's say I'm willing to pay $8 for a click, but you're willing to pay $10 per click. We would naturally assume that LinkedIn would look at it and say, Oh, that person is willing to pay $10 A click that's $2. More for a click than Aj is. Let's show their ad. So that situation seems pretty easy at first blush. Well, what about if you and I are both willing to pay $10 for a click? How does LinkedIn then decide which of our ads they're going to show? Google's answer to this was called the quality score. And the essence of it was, if we're only paying for when someone clicks, then LinkedIn can figure out which one of us is more likely to make the network money when they show our ads. So for example, let's say that my ads have a .5% click through rate, meaning that every 200 times they show my sponsored content ad, I'm going to get a click, and LinkedIn is going to make $10. But in this example, you're also bidding $10. But historically, your ads get a 1% click through rate. So your ads get clicked on twice as often as mine. LinkedIn looks at that and says, whoa, both of these advertisers are willing to pay $10. But they make $10 for every 100 people they show your ad to, but they only make $10 for every 200 people they show my ad to. So now you can see how it's in Lincoln's best interest to show the ads of the advertiser who tends to get the best engagement. So the metric that judges how effective you are at getting people to click on your ads, and how effective I am at getting people to click on mine is called our relevancy score. Really similar concept on Google, it's called quality score, really similar concept on Facebook ads, it's called relevance score. And it's really cool. But the challenge to it is we as advertisers, we don't know what our relevancy score is. Google used to show us quality scores all the way down to the ad level. But over time, they took that visibility away, which makes a lot of sense, because it's in the platform's best interest to hide your relevancy score or your quality score from you. The reason why is just so someone doesn't game it. So let's say your relevancy score is updated every single day, and LinkedIn shows it to you. That means you can effectively do one test per day on changing an ad or launching a new campaign. And maybe over time, you can start to understand how your relevancy score is affected by the changes that you make, effectively gaming the system. Many of you know my background, I started out in Google ads. And I know that the quality score algorithm was something that was heavily debated by advertisers. We always wanted to try to figure out more about what goes into it and how it's taken into account. This dates me a little bit, but I remember back when Google announced that they had 21 different factors that affected their quality score. So when I started getting really heavy into LinkedIn Ads, I was pleasantly surprised how simple the relevancy is. Your calculation really was. At the time your relevancy score was really just a combination of your historical click through rates and your current click through rates. So if your campaign has had really good click through rates over a long period of time, and you launch a new ad into that campaign, you may start out with a really good assumed relevancy score, which is so helpful. LinkedIn's product team hasn't given me any sort of insight into LinkedIn relevancy score, currently. But my guess is, it's now gotten a lot more complex. But we'll of course talk about that a little bit later. So your relevancy score is effectively a normalized range from zero to 10. Zero meaning that your ads are providing no value, and a 10 mins that people are clicking on it like crazy, and really loving what you're putting out as an advertiser. Now I say a normalized range, because if you are a seven today, but all of a sudden, a competitor enters the auction against you, and they have a much higher relevancy score, let's say they have a nine, your relevancy score is a calculation of your performance compared to those who are in the auction with you. And so yours might sway. Yours might bumped down to a six, because there's just so good, and it's all averaged. Okay, so you have this relevancy score that somewhere between zero and 10, and you start bidding in the auction, you don't know what those who are bidding against you what they're bidding. And so it really is a blind auction that way. So that example that I used before, where you're willing to pay $10 for a click, and I'm only willing to pay eight. And of course, the auction is going to give it to you. Well, that's not the case. Thank goodness, it's not so simple. So the way it works is that two parties enter the auction. And in reality, there's a lot more than just two parties. But for simplicity's sake, let's say it's just you and I who are bidding for an audience member. Let's say I'm willing to pay $12 for a click, but you're only willing to pay $6.50 per click. So you're bidding basically half of what I'm bidding. So at first blush, you're now thinking, ooh, it sure seems like LinkedIn is going to want to show AJs ad over mine. But now when I tell you that behind the scenes, this campaign only has a relevancy score of four, but yours has a relevancy score of eight, what LinkedIn is doing behind the scenes, they are multiplying my bid, times my relevancy score, and your bid times your relevancy score, to get this combined score. So in this case, my combined score would be a 48. It's my bid of $12 times my relevancy score of four, and you're bidding $6.50. But you already have a relevancy score of eight, which if you multiply that together, you get a 52. So now what LinkedIn is doing is saying, Ooh, whoever has the highest combined score is who actually wins the auction for their ad to show in this exact impression that just arose. Okay, so your combined score is higher than mine, which means you're going to win the impression. But now LinkedIn has to decide how much are you going to pay for that click, because we were obviously bidding very different amounts. I was willing to pay $12 for a click, and you were only willing to pay $6.50. So the way that it does this is it takes the second place bidders That's mine, my combined score, which in this case is a 48. And then they divide that by your relevancy score, which is an eight. This simple mathematical operation tells the system what the second place bidder would have had to bid in order to become the first place. And with this simple mathematical operation, it lets us see exactly what you would have had to bid in order to beat me in the auction, which would have been exactly $6. And because LinkedIn is a second price auction, the same auction model that Google pioneered, we add one cent to it. So basically, even though you're bidding $6.50, you only have to pay $6.01 for that click, because that's all it took for you to outbid me. If this is a little bit complex to hear about math over a podcast, I totally get it. Down in the show notes, you can click on a video that LinkedIn created that actually explains their auction system, and they show it with a really cool animation, I think you'll like it. So now you understand how the auction system works behind the scenes. But that's not especially helpful because all of this is visible to LinkedIn, those who are hosting the auction, but it's totally invisible to you. All you see is you bid a certain amount, and then get a certain amount of impressions that turned into a certain number of clicks. So you can change your bids frequently and try to understand how close am I to be getting more advertisers in the auction and being able to win a lot more impressions, or how low can I bid without losing the vast majority of my impressions that I get. But LinkedIn is help article will tell us exactly how they explain relevancy score. It says, ads are assigned a relevancy score that measures how likely a member is to take an action on the app. Relevancy scores include factors like expected click through rate, comments, likes, and shares, your relevancy score can change over time, as members interact with your content. While you can't see your ads relevancy score, you can use the campaign quality score as a proxy. So this gives us a really important clue. When I go and run a campaign export from within campaign manager, I noticed one of the columns says campaign quality score. And that's a number from zero to 10, which looks a lot like relevancy score. So if we read into what LinkedIn is saying, we can look at campaign quality score, and it acts as a proxy to what our relevancy score is. But we won't actually know what our relevancy score is. So relevancy score is something that applies to ads and to campaigns, but your campaign quality score is just that same normalized range from zero to 10 that describes the campaign. So they're essentially not giving you any information about individual ads, but you do get a little bit about the campaign itself. Alright, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive back into the meat of it. 16:19 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. If you're a B2B company and care about getting more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, then chances are LinkedIn ads are for you. But the platform isn't easy to use, and can be painfully expensive on the front end, at B2Linked, we've cracked the code to maximizing ROI while minimizing costs. Our methodology includes building and executing LinkedIn Ads strategies that are customized to your unique needs, and tailored to the way B2B consumers buy today. Over the last 11 years, we've worked with some of the largest LinkedIn advertisers in the world, we've spent over $150 million dollars on the platform, and we're official LinkedIn partners. If you want to generate more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, book a discovery call at B2linked.com/apply, today. We'd absolutely love to get to work with you. Alright, let's jump back into relevancy scores here. So when I used to look at the campaign quality score column, in my campaigns report, I honestly thought that oh, some engineer at LinkedIn who used to work at Google, accidentally mislabeled it and wrote quality score when they should have written relevancy score. But I put a post out in June, asking for help and thoughts from the LinkedIn masters out there. And one of my connections, Decker Frasier., he turned me on to this. He pointed me towards that help article, where it talks about how your quality score is a proxy for your relevancy score, but they're not going to show you what the actual relevancy score is. So Decker, thanks so much for turning me on to that. That was new info for me. So then I got to dive into the help article all about campaign quality scores. And I've linked to that article below if you wanted to go and do your own research. The article starts off "A campaign quality score is an estimate of how likely a member is to act on a sponsored content ad in your campaign. scores help indicate how relevant your campaigns are compared to your peers campaigns targeting that same audience." So immediately, we're understanding that this is totally based on the competition around you. So you could have a terrible click through rate and still have a great quality score if all of your competitors are also getting terrible click through rates. Or conversely, you can have an amazing click through rate, but if so many of your competitors have even better than you're just stuck with a normal or an average quality score. The article then goes on to explain how campaign quality scores are based on the predicted click through rate of the ads in your campaign, as well as the predicted click through rate of your peers ads targeting the same audience. So that raises the question, how does LinkedIn predict what your click through rate is going to be? Here's another little nugget to point out in this article, campaign quality scores and predicted click through rate are only helpful for evaluating campaigns using CPC bidding. So what that means is, the only ones of us who are actually part of the auction are those who are bidding by the click. So if you are bidding by the impression, or if you're using LinkedIn's maximum delivery or auto bidding options, you're effectively bypassing the auction entirely. You don't have to worry about your campaign quality scores or your relevancy scores. And that's because if you tell LinkedIn that you're willing to pay a certain amount, regardless of who clicks for every 1000 times they show your ad, LinkedIn can very easily compare you to another advertiser who's saying the same thing. So if you're willing to pay $120 for them to show your ad to 1000 users, and your competitor is only willing to pay $100 to reach that same 1000 users, LinkedIn doesn't have to do much calculating at all. It just says, oh, that advertiser is willing to pay me $20 more for the same traffic, I'm going to give them more impressions. I have had several members of my team come to me and say, "Hey, has campaign quality score gone away? Because when I run a report, I don't see it in there." Well, LinkedIn is help article here says, "If a campaign quality score isn't available, it's probably because your campaign isn't active, or it's not using the sponsored content ad format. Or maybe it's too early. And your campaigns ads haven't competed in the minimum number of options for that score to be calculated." So if that column is blank for your campaign, one of those four reasons is going to be why. 20:47 So that then begs the question, how do we improve our quality scores or our relevancy scores? Well, that's pretty simple. It's improving our click through rate. But of course, that's much easier said than done, check out Episode 59, where we talk all about how to increase click through rates, and all the different controls we have on them. And although our bid doesn't directly contribute to your relevancy score, your bid is used in the calculation of your combined score, which then decides if you win auctions or not. Let's say you're bidding pretty low at $7 per click, you may see that you get, let's say, 200 impressions per day. If after increasing your bid to $12 per click, you might see your impressions jump up to 1000 per day. And what that means is you were only winning like 200 impressions per day with your lower bid, but now that you're bidding higher, you're qualifying and winning a lot more of these auctions. But of course, as you're bidding higher, it means those auctions that you do win and when a user actually clicks, you will pay quite a bit more for that, click, go back and check out Episode Six, that was all about bidding, if you want to become an absolute ninja Jedi Master or whatever, on the whole topic of bidding. If we look at the other platforms, especially like Google and Facebook, who are much much more advanced in tech, it might afford us a bit of a glimpse into what relevancy score will be in the future, or maybe what it's already developing to be. Google, for instance, has so many advertisers and so much competition, that just deciding someone's quality score based off of the click through rate of their ads, it doesn't tell the whole picture. So think about the other kinds of factors, which might tell the platform, how successful you are as an advertiser. Some of those things might be when you are sending traffic to a landing page. If that landing page loads really slowly, you could tell that people who are clicking on those ads probably are not going to have the best experience and they may end up bouncing before the page even loads. So it's much better for them to reward the advertiser with a higher quality score, whose pages load near immediately. With Google, it's really simple because they're searching by keywords and so Google can take into account how relevant the keyword is that someone clicked from, to the keywords that are actually found on the page. Who knows if LinkedIn is using something like this, but they certainly could. So my recommendation to you is whether LinkedIn or using any other factors other than your historical and current click through rates or not, I would go and look at things like content of my landing page and how fast it loads. Because you can guess that if Google and Facebook had been doing something for lots of years, LinkedIn is sure to follow. Something else we have to talk about is how LinkedIn reps talk about pausing your campaigns or pausing your ads. There can be lots of great reasons to pause a campaign or pause ads, but if you're working tightly with a LinkedIn rep, you've probably heard them say, "Don't pause your ads or your campaigns, because it will affect your relevancy score, or it will reset your relevancy score." And we've done a lot of testing because this sort of sounded like an empty threat to us. And largely, I think it is, we've had several reps tell us that if you pause your campaigns for more than two weeks, then when you go to turn them back on, your relevancy score is totally reset. And I definitely don't think that his reps are lying. But I understand if they are bonused, based off of how much their advertisers are spending, and we pause things like over the weekend or at nights, then the campaign's will likely not end up spending as much as they're budgeted for. And so of course, the reps would want to caution us away from that. So in all of our testing, we found that pausing campaigns does not seem to affect us in the auction at all. That means if we pause a campaign with its ads for a full two weeks, and then turn it back on, if the relevancy score were reset, we should see action that was very much like the campaign was newly launched, which means it would probably enter a learning phase for the first one to one and a half days, where we either got fewer impressions or more impressions, as the system is just testing to see what relevancy score we actually deserve. So we haven't seen this action take place. But I'd love it if any of you have done this same test, if you're seeing anything like this, that would show to you that your relevancy score is being reset, then please do reach out to me and let me know. I'd be really curious to hear about that test. So let's say that LinkedIn is actually resetting our relevancy scores after pausing. If we're not seeing a big effect come from that. One reason could be that if LinkedIn shows your ads, and it's earned a certain relevancy score and place in the auction, and then you pause, and then start again, that audience is just as likely to interact with your ads the same way that they did before. And in fact, maybe even slightly higher, because they haven't seen the ads in two weeks. So those who have already interacted and seeing them, they have probably forgotten about seeing them, and it looks new to them. So that's a possible reason why even if your relevancy score does get scrubbed, after two weeks of pausing, why performance can still look good. But again, that's just a hypothesis. I'd love to hear from you guys, if you've seen any sort of effect like this. All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around. 26:28 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. All right, I mentioned Episode 59 of the show. For those of you who are curious about how to improve click through rates, definitely check that one out. It is the key to getting lower costs on LinkedIn. There's also the LinkedIn Help Center article about LinkedIn's Ad auction, and how it's calculated. That is sincerely interesting and I would recommend it as a read. There's also the article that we sampled out of here, the campaign quality scores for sponsored content help article. There are some great insights there. It's really awesome when LinkedIn is so transparent about how their system works. It sure helps us advance advertisers not put on our tinfoil hats and assume the worst. There's also LinkedIn's privacy centric page that talks all about their new initiatives around privacy. Definitely worth checking out, especially after Episode 70 all about the cookie pocalypse, you'll probably understand that one quite a bit better. I mentioned Episode Six all about bidding. That that one's definitely worth going back to have a listen, if you've missed that one. Or it's always worth a read, listen, because it's honestly one of the most important things from your whole. So go back and have a listen of that. In case you missed it. Or even if you've already heard it, it's super important. It is the basics of advanced LinkedIn Ad strategy. So make sure you know it like the back of your hand. If you or anyone else, you know, is looking to learn more about LinkedIn Ads, check out the link in the show notes for the course that I did on LinkedIn Learning all about the basics of LinkedIn Ads. It's incredibly inexpensive, and really high quality. The LinkedIn Learning folks really know what they're doing. If this is your first time listening, welcome, we're excited to have you here. Make sure you hit that subscribe button. Of course, that's only if you liked what you heard. If this is not your first time listening, please pay us the fee of leaving a review on the podcast. It really, really helps. I'm not just saying that. And of course I'd love to shout you out for leaving a review. For any questions, feedback or suggestions on the show, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives!

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Lead Gen Form Ads Reporting UTM live builder NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.   Show Transcript I think B2B marketing and CRMs go together like chocolate and caramel. Today, we're diving into CRM reporting on this episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there, LinkedIn Ads fanatics! If you listened to the last episode about the cookiepocalypse, you know that conversion tracking as we know, it probably isn't going to be reliable in the future. Luckily, B2B and E commerce have something in common here. In E commerce, marketers will always have purchase data, whether or not it occurred, what the sale value was, etc. And no cookie can affect that. There's a very clear line all the way from ad impression to a purchase. In business to business. When someone fills out a form it goes into your CRM. So if you're doing it right, there's never a challenge in figuring out how many leads came from a specific effort. If someone filled out a form and submitted it, it's in the database, it's become increasingly important in business to business to make sure that we've got data available to us as marketers, so we can close the loop on reporting. That way, when a platforms conversion tracking is way under reporting, because cookie data is limited, or when a platform may be way over reporting because it's using some algorithm to calculate the estimated number of conversions, you can be totally carefree. On this episode, we're gonna dive into the connection between your ads efforts, and your CRM platform and show you what you can do with the day that to close that reporting. Another hat tip to Mark Bissoni for requesting this topic. And any of you out there who have a topic you'd like us to cover, please do reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. We are always looking forward to helping you become more super powered and hear about the topics that you're interested in. In the news, for you listeners who are attending HubSpot Inbound conference in Boston, I'm going to be speaking on Thursday there. So I'd love to get to connect if you're going to be in town. I heard a couple of weeks back that my session was totally filled up. So I hope you got registered early. But if not get there early to stand in the standby line, I speak at quite a few digital marketing conferences every year. And Inbound is by far the largest one that I speak at. And it's one of the ones I most look forward to every year. Okay, for the topic at hand, let's hit it. 2:27 What is a CRM? What is a CRM? First of all, we talk about it a lot in business to business, we may use the acronym, or we may say customer relationship management platform. But realistically, we're gonna say CRM, because the other one just hardly makes any sense. It's basically a database of your customers, your prospects, really anyone you'd want to keep track of. There are so many different types of CRMs out there. Really, anything can qualify as a CRM. If you just keep an Excel sheet, or a Google sheet of all of your current customers with some data about them, that is a really basic CRM. So don't be daunted when you hear the term if you haven't heard of it before. Some of the major CRMs that you've probably heard of before, are like Salesforce, HubSpot, Constant Contact. There's way, way, way too many to list all here. And all of them have their own personalities. Some are very tailored to sales, some are tailored more to marketing, some are better for email versus reps who are making calls. We B2Linked we actually went through several CRMs testing this, and we would have one that worked really, really well when we were doing outbound. And another that was much better with handling inbound. One connected to email really well and made it easier to do newsletters. And ultimately, you're gonna have to study all of the different capabilities based off of what you need your CRM to do. I would say most of our larger clients use Salesforce. And what's so cool about Salesforce is it's infinitely customizable. You can literally make it do whatever you want. But along with that customizability it means it's incredibly complex. Most of our clients who use salesforce.com have an internal Salesforce admin whose job it is just to keep the platform up and running. So if you don't want to hire a full time admin, there are certainly simpler CRMs. But it's great because you can make it do whatever you want. HubSpot has recently become a pretty great contender in the enterprise space. It offers the CRM functionality for free, but then the fees really start to kick in when you add on different marketing or different sales packages. I should say that HubSpot relationship with LinkedIn really makes it special. Because HubSpot and LinkedIn communicate really well. A lot of these integrations that we're going to talk about are done pretty much automatically. So as a marketer, why would you want to do this? Why should you care about a CRM? The simple fact is that your CRM extends your data, your ability to analyze, and your optimizations, beyond just those front end metrics. If all you do is rely on just LinkedIn's campaign manager, the deepest insights that you can get are things like a cost per lead, or a conversion rate, which as you'll remember from the last episode, those metrics are even getting muddy. So that means you can't actually get accurate lead counts, or number of qualified leads, or figure out your lead quality by campaign, or even solve the Holy Grail, which is calculating your ROI. You can't do any of this without involving your CRM. 5:26 Getting the advertising data into the CRM In order to connect your advertising data in with your CRM, you have to get the advertising data into the CRM. And there are two different ways to do that. The first is if you're using LinkedIn lead generation forms. If you want to know more about this, go back to Episode 17, where we did a deep dive on them. And these are really, really great, they tend to have super high conversion rates. But because that data actually lives on LinkedIn, you then have to get that data out. Of course, you could log into LinkedIn every day, and download the leads that have occurred in the past 24 hours, and then manually process them. But good heavens, if you are listening to this podcast, you are paid way too much for doing that activity. 6:07 Automation Okay, so let's figure out how to automate that. LinkedIn has partnered with several of these CRMs to allow you to just send that data directly into the CRM without any sort of human contact, Salesforce.com, HubSpot, Marketo, Eloqua, and quite a few others, I've included a link down below in the show notes so you can see all of the different integration partners with your LinkedIn Ads. But if you're not using one of the CRMs, that LinkedIn fully integrates with, don't worry about that, because you have a pretty cheap solution. Zapier.com, last time I checked, their $20 per month plan could get all of your LinkedIn lead gen formatted data directly into about any CRM or any workflow that you want. And $20 a month is definitely a cheap price to pay, compared to having to do that all manually. So that's LinkedIn lead gen forms. What if you're driving traffic to your website and you want the form on your website to pass into your CRM? That's definitely possible. We've all been doing that for years. And here's how that process works. First of all, when someone clicks on your ad and visits your landing page, the link that they visit, can and should have tracking information in it. We call these tracking parameters. So those tracking parameters are just sitting in the address bar when someone is there on your page. And then when they decide to fill out the form, the info that it asks for might be things like your name, your email, etc. And then they hit submit. But what they don't know is that before the form is submitted, the JavaScript of the page made note of the whole URL that was up in the address bar, and all of its tracking parameters that could have in it, and it sent them along into the CRM, along with those visible form fields. So the CRM now has data about who someone was, as well as a little bit of information about where that traffic came from, which is incredibly helpful to you as a marketer. So then your CRM needs to be configured to actually look for those parameters and how to recognize them. And it'll store them inside that lead record that was just created through that form submission. Since the vast majority of marketers out there are using Google Analytics, we should take some time to talk about UTM parameters. Now don't get confused by the acronym UTM. Hardly anyone knows what it means it doesn't really mean anything. It stands for urchin tracking module. Urchin was the company that Google acquired to actually turn it into Google Analytics. So it's just a brand name, you don't have to worry about it. But now we as marketers talk a lot about UTM parameters, because Google Analytics has a set of five standard parameters that it accepts natively. And those are source, medium, campaign, content, and term. The first three are required, you need to provide a source, a medium and a campaign, but content and term and then a whole bunch of other custom ones, they're optional. So I'll give you an example. If I was sending traffic from LinkedIn Ads into my website, my UTM parameter for source would probably be LinkedIn. It's the website or the channel that I'm using. For my medium, I like to identify the different ad formats I'm using. So if I'm sending sponsored content ads to my website, I would probably put SC for sponsored content in media. Then for campaign I like to actually include information about either the actual campaign within LinkedIn, or a description of the audience. And that way, if I go into Google Analytics, I can see all of my reporting by audience segment, which is really cool. Then we have content. And Google originally designed this to be a way that you could tell the difference between your AB tests that you're running. So when we create ads, every single ad has its own unique UTM content parameter. And because it absolutely has to be unique. By far the easiest way I've found to make something unique is to stick today's date in it because obviously today's dates not going to repeat itself. So one of our content parameters might look really daunting to someone who doesn't know what they're looking at. But it may say something like LI, short for LinkedIn, SC, short for sponsored content, and then a six digit number representing today's date. And then like 0102, an incremental digit for which ad this was that we were publishing. And what's so cool is because that content parameter includes all of that information, it allows us to go back and figure out the exact image, the exact everything that was associated with that ad later on. And we track that all internally with proprietary tools. So this is obviously a very proprietary way that we handle the UTM content parameter. But I hope just as an example, this was helpful or interesting to you. The last standard UTM parameter is term. And that was used to track the individual keyword from different search campaigns. But obviously, because we're dealing with paid social here with LinkedIn, we don't really bid by keyword. So term is just one of those ones that's leftover. You could use it for something if you want, but you don't have to. So whether you're using Google Analytics or not, you can still use Google's UTM parameters. Or you could really use anything else. For instance, if you use Adobe Analytics, which is very much used by those enterprise companies, they have a parameter called a CID parameter. And of course, it can be very customized. But this is oftentimes one parameter that represents everything that Google asked for five parameters to represent. When you're advertising on Google, on Google Ads, Google will automatically put something called a gclid, or a Google Click ID inside the URL. And a lot of people are able to grab that parameter and make it useful and identifying an individual click. Facebook has something similar, they call it the FBclid, or Facebook click identifier. And if you don't want to use any of these, you don't have to, you could do your own custom URL parameters. If you look at a URL, anything after the question mark doesn't usually change the content of the page or change the address of the page at all. It's just extra information for some system about that traffic. There are a few very technical exceptions here. But usually, when you look at a URL, the address of the page ends, right as soon as you hit the question mark, and then everything after that, you can change and make whatever you want. So the question mark becomes your first query parameter. And then if you have multiples, they are separated by the ampersand or the and sign. So you can have as many query parameters as you want, it's just the first one is going to start with a question mark. All the other ones after are ampersands. And there's absolutely nothing magic about the parameters that you choose, it just means that you're going to have to configure some system to recognize and identify them, and store them if you want to use them. So if you haven't built parameters before, especially if you're using Google Analytics, there are a whole bunch of free tools out there to build your UTM parameters and your URLs for you. We've linked to one down in the show notes called utmbuilder.com. But it's a very, very simple type of function. And so a whole bunch of different companies have evolved to do this for free. We actually do this all within Excel. We have an automatic URL builder that grabs things from all the different columns that we're building our ads inside of Excel with, and just concatenates them together in the right format. So there are a lot of options, you can really do this any way you want. And we're going to talk a lot about how this information makes it into your forms. But it's helpful to know that UTM parameters were originally designed just to tell your analytic solution, how to categorize the traffic that you're bringing in. So for instance, if you click on a post inside of LinkedIn, that takes you to someone's website, Google Analytics is going to see the referring URL as LinkedIn. And that's pretty much all it knows. And it knows that LinkedIn is a social platform. It's going to categorize that as an organic social referral, which is actually correct in this case. But what if you were running ads on LinkedIn, and you didn't put any sort of parameters in the URL, someone clicks from one of your ads and lands on your website. And now Google Analytics is categorizing it exactly the same, it thinks it was an organic referral from social. But if you put UTM parameters in your URLs, you're telling Google Analytics, this is how I need you to classify this traffic. This is not an organic referral. This is an ad click. And here's the audience that was targeting. And here's what ad type we were using all kinds of different information that you can pass to them be able to properly analyze your marketing efforts. They enable you to look inside of analytics and see website traffic behavior, broken down by any of the UTM parameters you set up. You can see things like average session duration, or pages viewed by campaign or audience or individual ad or ad type. Really, possibilities are nearly endless. Alright, here's a quick sponsor break and then we'll dive into the weaknesses of URL track. 14:52 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. 15:01 If you're a B2B company and care about getting more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, then chances are LinkedIn Ads are for you. But the platform isn't easy to use and can be painfully expensive on the front end, at B2Linked, we've cracked the code to maximizing ROI while minimizing costs. Our methodology includes building and executing LinkedIn Ad strategies, customized to your unique needs, and tailored to the way B2B companies buy today. Over the last 11 years, we've worked with some of LinkedIn largest advertisers in the world, we've spent over $150 million dollars on the platform, and we're official LinkedIn partners. If you want to generate more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, book a discovery call at B2linkedin.com/apply, we'd absolutely love to get to work with you. 15:49 Weaknesses of URL tracking Alright, let's jump into the weaknesses of URL tracking. So first off, since it captures only traffic that submitting forms, this is best suited for what we would call the trust stage. We tend to break our stages down into three different stages, your awareness, your trust, and your advocacy. So you could have tracking parameters in your URLs. But if no one ever fills out a form, it really didn't do much except communicate to your analytics solution where the traffic came from, but nothing is going to make it into your CRM. So you wouldn't be able to tell from your CRM, about view through conversions, or assists from other platforms. The cool thing though, is that your analytics platform can still track what you define as a conversion. And the analytics solution is going to attempt to track all of the activity of that user. Of course, if you listen to our last episode about the cookie pocalypse conversion tracking may not be all that reliable in the future. So we'll just kind of have to wait and see. 16:43 Tracking Parameters And then some web developer decided they wanted their URLs to look clean. And so they do something in JavaScript called a URL rewrite. And then the website can I have come across some websites that do some crazy stuff with URLs. So for instance, you might send a URL with all of the tracking parameters. And then some web developer decided they wanted their URLs to look clean. And so they do something in JavaScript called a URL rewrite. And then the website can automatically strip out your tracking parameters to try to make the site look really clean to your user. The problem is that when that URL gets rewritten, it destroys your tracking. It might be great for visual cleanliness. But the vast majority of users are not going to care that they have junk at the end of their URL, we're so used to seeing long URLs with stuff that we don't understand. Another weakness that we've come across is if someone lands on the page, and then has URL parameters in their URL, but then they click to a different page, those parameters are then lost. Your analytic solution knows that that traffic came in from those parameters. But if that second page is the one with the contact form, and it's trying to grab those parameters, they're not there and it's just going to send through blanks. So when advertising on LinkedIn, my recommendation is to land traffic on a landing page that has the form on that same page. Don't give them opportunities to click elsewhere. Otherwise, you'll lose a lot of this tracking data, we actually experienced this ourselves, we sent ad traffic to a page with a link to a contact form. And of course, we love when someone chooses to contact us. But then as soon as the user navigated to the page with the form, it dropped their URL tracking parameters and so we lost them. We still ask them the discovery call where someone heard about us. So we'll still get a little bit of data about which channels are performing and turning into appointments for us. But it's not nearly as reliable as if I had the UTM content parameter telling me exactly which ad drove that person. So you need to make sure that you configure your CRM to accept this data that you're giving. And this is all to make sure that when someone submits the form, and that data is passed into your CRM, it carries with it information about the source of that traffic. And that means that any lead that enters into your CRM that had tracking parameters in the URL when the form was filled out, would communicate that source information on that lead form. So now once you have the data in your CRM, we get to do some really cool stuff. As a disclaimer here, I'm going to talk you through the steps that I would take in Excel to do this. So if you're not already comfortable with Excel, this may sound a little bit like gobbledygook. But first off, you want to go and find out in your CRM, how do you generate a report for a specific timeframe? What this report should look like the first column should be the date. The second column should be some tracking parameter. For us, it would be the UTM content parameter, but you could put anything you want in there, the UTM campaign, it could be an Adobe ad CID, or anything else. And all subsequent columns would be a count of the number of records for each of the down funnel conversion steps that you want to track. So for instance, in standard B2B, we might have like an MQL for marketing qualified leads and an SQL for sales qualified leads. We might have number of proposals sent out Number of close deals that happened. And that means any of my tracking parameters that brought in a lead, or graduated to an SQL or graduated to a proposal or a closed deal on that date, it would have an incremental digit in one of those columns. You export this to Excel so that you can get ready to combine it with your spend performance data. I'm going to refer to this CRM data as CRM data from now on. Then you want to actually go to your LinkedIn ads reporting. So you go into LinkedIn Ads, it's very important, you want to make sure you've set your timeframe for your reporting as the same timeframe that you're looking at for your CRM data, then you want to export your ad performance data into Excel. Now, it's really important that you do choose the ad Performance Report, because that's the report that is going to have all of your click URLs in them. And your click URLs is where your UTM parameters or other tracking parameters are housed. You should generate this as an all time report. Otherwise, you might have a row for every single ad that ran for every single month or every single day that it ran. So generate that as an all time combined report and then you won't need to run an extra Pivot Table on your data later, which would be a pain. If you haven't listened to Episode 69 of the podcast all about reporting, you'll definitely want to make sure you do that. Then the next steps that I do is I will take the destination URL column, which houses all of the URLs with their tracking parameters and I make a duplicate of that column. And someone who's really good at Excel is about to tell me how dumb I'm doing this, I need to strip out just the tracking parameters that I care about into their own columns. And so I do this with the search and replace function inside of Excel. If I'm trying to isolate just my UTM content parameter. For instance, I'm going to do a search and replace on that column in Excel. I'm going to start with the asterisk, which is a wildcard in Excel. And then I'm going to put UTM underscore content equals and then I'm going to leave the replace blank. So what happens is Excel is looking for anything that comes before UTM underscore content equals and replacing it with nothing. So now on the left side of that URL, I have only the contents of my UTM content parameter. If there are other parameters that came after it, I can do the same thing by doing a search and replace for whatever comes after that maybe the first few characters or something with a wildcard after that. And then again, replace that with nothing. Now I have a column where just the values of my UTM content parameters are housed. If I care about the other UTM parameters, I can do the same thing to isolate source, medium, campaign, term, etc. So now you have a column for each UTM parameter that was associated with each ad. So now I can create a pivot table where the row is the tracking parameter and then my values are the columns that I bring in are things like spend, impressions, clicks, and any other ad performance data I care about. So this sheet that you're working with right now becomes your base data, as I call it. So you want to keep this sheet open. And I'm going to refer to this as your ads data from now on. So if you're tracking so far, we have a spreadsheet containing your CRM data. And we have this one that contains your ad data. So now you want to go and take your CRM data and paste it into a new sheet in your workbook. That way, it's one Excel file that houses all of your CRM and your ad performance data. Then once it's all in one sheet, you get to start doing the magic work, you can start combining your ads data with your CRM data to find insights. So in your ads data, I would then go and create a new column for each of the lead stages. So I might create a column for MQL, one for SQL, one for proposal, one for closed deal. And then to fill those columns up, I'm going to do a V lookup, which allows me to bring in the number of each type of those conversions by whichever tracking parameter was there within my ads. So if I were doing it, I would look for that ads individual UTM content parameter, that's my tracking parameter, then I would go to our sheet that contains the CRM data and pull in the number of MQLs associated with that UTM parameter. I'd go and do the same thing, another lookup to bring in the second stage, maybe SQL, another one to bring in proposals, and other to bring in closes. So now we don't even need that sheet with our CRM data anymore. We can do everything from right within the ABS data. Now highlight all of your ABS data and create a pivot table from there. And again, you want your tracking parameter to be the row and then for your values. You want to bring in all of your ad performance. So your spend your impressions your clicks, video views, whatever you want to bring in. And then what I do is inside of that pivot table, I go to create additional calculated columns. You can do it manually is kind of the lazy way. But it's a lot easier to do this as calculated columns. So I'll go and create calculated columns for click through rate and cost per click. I'll create one for conversion rate, that is essentially my MQLs divided by my clicks, or leads, divided by clicks, whatever you're using, I can create one for cost per conversion. But now because I have these columns in my data for number of MQLs, number of SQL, all those further lead stages, I can create a calculated column of my cost per MQL, my cost per SQL, my cost per proposal, my cost per closed deal. Extra credit if you're actually pulling in the deal value from your CRM, then you could actually do a calculation of my actual return on adspend, or my return on investment. I also like to create columns for my close rate, or my graduation rate from every stage of the funnel. So I could show my graduation rate from MQL to SQL. So now you're actually looking at a report making decisions about the ad performance, based on the performance all the way down the funnel. It allows you to make decisions like oh, my cost per conversion is cheap with this audience, but they convert to sales qualified lead at a really poor rate. So it's really not worth us running. And there are so many more steps here that just talking you through, it isn't going to work very well. So I would encourage you to come follow us on YouTube. And I'm going to do a walkthrough of a down funnel report, the whole build, in the coming weeks, so you can follow along. And you can see the link to our YouTube channel, just down in the show notes below. Make sure you're subscribed. 26:44 Nurturing Your Leads So let's get away from the geeky stuff. Now, what can you do to actually nurture your leads, once they're in the CRM? Well, remember, your CRM is basically just a database of the people that you've put in there. So you could export from your CRM, all current customers, and then upload that into LinkedIn as a matched audience, to target and show messaging to those who are your current customers, which could be really good for retaining them. And once you have that list, you can also exclude it from your other targeting, so that you're not showing prospecting ads to people who are already paying you money. Something else I really like to do from nurture, is download a list of active leads, especially the companies that who have become leads, but haven't yet closed the deal. And I can upload that into LinkedIn, and create a warming campaign just around trying to inspire those active leads to close. But of course, if this is done inside of your CRM, most of the time, this is able to be pushed out through your marketing automation workflow, or as an email list. So the same advertising you could do to people who are active leads, but haven't closed, you could also send them emails to keep them informed. Or maybe your marketing automation system does SMS or text messaging. If you have a list of emails, most ad platforms, at least the major ones, allow you to upload those lists of emails and target them with ads, just like LinkedIn. But Facebook, custom audiences can do it. Google can, Quora can, Twitter can. So there's a lot here that you can do across all of your different platforms. And just another note here on lead quality reporting, you could wait for sales to give you some sort of a lead quality or a lead score on the leads as they come in. But I find if I have enough leads coming in just my graduation rate from MQL to SQL, or SQL, which might be stage two to stage three, whatever comes next is going to be really effective at telling me the quality of the leads that are coming through. If they're not graduating to stage two or stage three in my sales process, chances are sales does not think those leads are very high quality. So for instance, if one campaign has a higher cost per SQL than another campaign, you can take action by lowering the bids or pausing that campaign entirely. Or if you have one ad that has a terrible graduation rate, you could pause that ad and go and try something else. 27:16 Pitfalls As you're setting up your CRM to be able to do everything that we're talking about, there are some pitfalls that you might come across. So let's go through a few of those. We have had a situation several times with our clients CRMs, where our point of contact will ask us to send over the tracking parameters in advance so that they can set the CRM up to recognize and watch for that parameter to occur. We don't want to do this, since it requires human work before every ad launch. And if you happen to launch ads before that work has been done in the CRM, then the CRM won't properly track that traffic, which is not great. So just know that whatever CRM you're using, it can be set up so you don't have to do this. What it does is it just dynamically grabs every parameter from the URL and inserts it in the lead record. So make sure you're set up to do that. I should note that hubs Spot does this really, really well, because of its integration with LinkedIn. As traffic comes in from LinkedIn to your website into HubSpot, I'm pretty sure this is already right out of the gate. Another pitfall that we've come across is multiple forms being filled out by the same user ends up overwriting the tracking parameters from the last time. So for instance, if I clicked on a LinkedIn ad, and filled out a form, and then came back three weeks later from a Google retargeting ad, and then filled out a different form, as they both go into the CRM, a lot of times what happens is the CRM goes, oh, we have an update on this user and so I'm going to delete the tracking parameters that say that they came from LinkedIn and update it as now they came from Google. And I'm sure you can see why this is a problem. If you're trying to track your LinkedIn performance, you don't want to lose those leads that are just taking further action with the website. So what you want to happen is you want to stack all of their tracking parameters. So every time a user comes through, and fills out a form, and they come up with new tracking parameters, it just keeps record of all of the steps that that user took in their journey. You might also have some logic that decides how to treat duplicate form fills. Some teams really care about net new leads. So sure, you're gonna drive traffic from LinkedIn. And the same person over a two month period maybe has filled out a form twice so there's two conversions. But if the team says we only care about net new conversions, they might treat that just as a single conversion. I get asked a lot about different attribution models. Do we recommend first touch attribution, last touch, W shaped multi touch? Well, I definitely have an opinion here. But I don't have a blanket opinion that boosts one model up over another. The model I care about is what I call any touch attribution. Since we're managing only one ad channel, but our clients, our points of contact, they need to judge the performance over multiple channels that they oversee, they're going to need to select the attribution model that they care about and want to use. And we do of course, hope that it's one that fairly attributes the performance across all the channels. So that's attribution done by the manager. But I suggest every individual channel owner gets access to every single lead that was touched by their channel. And I call this any touch attribution. What this means is when we go to do reporting on LinkedIn ad performance, every ad and every conversion that was driven, I can then link up to spend that occurred on the platform. So we have a precise calculation for the cost per lead, and their cost per qualified lead, etc. And ultimately, if the manager decides that they want to give the credit for a deal, partially or fully to another channel, I don't care. What I care about is getting as much data about which of my ads and campaigns are driving actions. So I can then go and optimize towards those data points and make the LinkedIn account better. So as a recap here, managers over multiple accounts should be using a general attribution method. But individual channel owners should be running off of any touch attribution, because you're definitely going to want as much data about performance down funnel as possible to help improve your ad creative. 30:53 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. 33:29 We mentioned lead gen form ads on LinkedIn, that's episode 17, so go and make sure you've listened to that. Also, Episode 69 is all about reporting so make sure you've caught up on that. To build UTM parameters onto your URLs, that's just utmbuilder.com, You can see the link in the show notes as well. There's also a link to our YouTube channel where you can see future reporting breakdowns that I'm gonna do. If you or someone on your team is looking to learn more about LinkedIn Ads, definitely pass them the course you'll see the link down below. It's the LinkedIn Learning course all about LinkedIn Ads that I'm the author of. It's by far the least expensive and the most in depth training that you can find on LinkedIn Ads right now. So check that out. Also, look down at your podcast player right now. If you haven't already, hit subscribe, and everything I'm sharing with you absolutely is free. But I hope you'll consider going to actually leave us a review in your podcast player. It is the biggest way that you can say thanks for us putting these episodes together with any questions, tips, tricks, suggestions, anything like that, hit us up at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Data about cookies Browser fingerprinting Audience segmentation 1st party vs 3rd party cookies How Apple's ITP treats cookies Server side tracking with Google Ads Website demographics episode Sites the LAN shows up on NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.   Show Transcript Are you prepared for the cookiepocalypse? We're going full prepper on this episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Come step down into our homemade bunker. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! If you haven't been living under a rock, then you've likely heard about the impending doom of the browser cookie. Well, a lot of what we do as digital marketers is dependent on cookies. So you may have asked yourself, how much of your work will be affected. The subject is highly technical, so we wanted to simplify it as much as possible for you, just in case you're not a JavaScript developer. I'm going to run you through the basics of what cookies actually are, and what's happening to them. Then we'll get to jump into the cookiepocalypse and how it's affecting LinkedIn Ads specifically. As a bit of a disclaimer here, I did do a lot of research for this episode. But as a favor to those of you who are highly technical, if I got anything wrong here or overlooked anything, please do reach out and I'd love the correction and insights. Credit where credit is due, this is an episode that was requested again by Mark Bissoni like the last one. So thanks, Mark for the great ideass. I think we have one more from you here in the can. First in the news, my apologies for missing last week's episode. Our company went on a retreat, and we went down to beautiful St. George Utah. It was like a four hour drive for us. We rented a really cool mansion that had its own arcade and theater and pool. And we even spent a day at the sand dunes in side by sides and on dirt bikes. All of that was way cool, but my favorite part about it was that because we're a remote team, and we talk a lot over zoom, we discovered that no amount of zoom calls can take the place of the effectiveness of an in person conversation. As an example, a group of us were just sitting at a table working, and a conversation naturally started up. The result of the conversation was after an hour, we got way more movement on our own sales and marketing strategy than we've made the whole past year on it. Our company meetings went very much the same way. We found opportunities that we never would have found over zoom. We set company team and individual goals. And the excitement from that was palpable. Between you and I, I didn't know if the investment in the retreat was going to be a worthwhile expense. But boy, now after having done it, I'm a huge believer in company retreats. If you listen to episode 67, that was all about the organic side of LinkedIn. I have some sad news, our guest Mark Williams, his dad just passed away. I heard from his podcast. So those of you who aren't following that, if you're connected to him reaching out and just passing your condolences could probably go a long way. There have been a couple of LinkedIn features that have been rolled out or are in the process of rolling out some good, some bad. Let's talk about the audience insights tool. We talked about this one in the news section of episode 57. It's a really cool feature where you can go in and look at any given matched audience. And LinkedIn will tell you in great detail about the audiences and what they like and what they're into and what makes them up. And this is a feature we've been really excited about. We got to play around with it a little bit in its alpha or its beta. And now it's fun to see it out in everyone's accounts. If you want to access it go to plan in your navigation instead of campaign manager, and then audiences and then you can click the checkbox next to any of those audiences and click insights, then it will take you to the Insights page. If it hasn't been rolled out to you yet. It should very shortly we've seen it in the vast majority of our accounts. A new update that we were not fans of, LinkedIn made some changes to how they calculate reach. One of our loyal listeners, Tom Tigwell from the UK, he reached out to me about it and said, "Hey, did you see what LinkedIn is doing with reach? Looks like they're sunsetting it." We posted about this on LinkedIn, and Jay Rathell, another one of our loyal listeners, he talked to his rep and clarified a few things. And LinkedIn's response here is actually really applicable to today's topic. He said, as a result of identity changes, we're making updates to reach and frequency metrics in the campaign manager tool. The current reach frequency, and cost per 1000 members reached metrics will be replaced with a one day, seven day, and 30 day averages for each. The key result for brand awareness campaigns will be updated to a seven day average reach. Honestly, because LinkedIn is talking about these being a result of identity changes. I don't see how that's the case. These were already metrics that were done behind the scenes in Lincoln's back end. None of that was actually exposed to us except for general like reach and frequency numbers. So I don't see how that has anything to do with it, but I would love to be corrected there. I will say the reach and frequency numbers really never made sense to me the way they were reported. So it's possible that they're correcting something that never really worked anyway. But even if they were working as planned, I'm not a fan of this change with these metrics being bucketed together into 30 day, seven day, and one day averages. Because I wonder if I set my time range to overlap two of those different buckets, does that mean that my numbers are going to be horribly misreported because it's just taking a chunk of averages. I don't know, this is something we're going to be still exploring quite a bit. But thanks to Tom and Jay for helping us discuss these topics. We also had some interesting occurrences happen in the last few weeks, where some of our campaigns would overspend their budget. So we had two different of our reps reach out to their LinkedIn reps to get an answer of why this happened. And the reps responded in a way that was really mind blowing. So here's what they said, what we ended up doing was in these campaigns, we would lower the budget mid day. And then they went ahead and spent the entire allotted budget from before. So when we asked these reps about what was happening, they said, daily budget changes are not updated in real time, because that could create a loophole in which advertisers could take advantage of the system. For example, an advertiser could set a daily budget of $1,000 at the campaign activation, and then get a massive amount of impressions and clicks, then a few hours later, the same advertiser would lower down the budget to $10, and only pay a fraction of what the ad has been served. In terms, this is by design. And you'd have to wait till the next day to see the new daily budget reflected in the back end. And that answer didn't seem correct to me. Because at any point, if you lowered your budget down, LinkedIn can see on the back end what your budget was, and what changed. So no one would be able to pull the wool over LinkedIn's eyes here, and claim that they should only be spending $10 a day for that campaign. But definitely we expect that when we make a bidding or a budget change, it should be reflected in real time. We asked that same rep for clarification. And they responded, "Let's remember that if an advertiser sets a high budget and or high bids, they are increasing subsequent delivery, and thus chances to receive clicks, conversely, preventing other advertisers who can't compete with that budget to win the auction and push their ads on the platform. This is why even if the first advertiser decides at the end of the day to decrease the budget to minimal cost, our system will still honor the initial budget set for that day." That answer didn't seem very correct either. Then another one of our account managers that this happened to one of their accounts, they launched new campaigns with a daily budget of $100, just as a placeholder. And then after they'd spent about $85, we knocked him down to a $33 daily budget, but then the campaign's just kept spending. So we lowered him down to $20, trying to slam those brakes on. And then by the end of the day, they'd spent $150, which is the original budget plus 50%, which LinkedIn is allowed to spend. But the fact that we had lowered that budget down during the day before that spent happened, that was a little bit crazy. We sent that to the account rep. And this is a different rep altogether, we got a similar response back, but it wasn't word for word. So we know this wasn't just a copy paste from LinkedIn. If this actually is the case, how the auction system works, this is a big deal for us. I would have expected LinkedIn to have some sort of a formal announcement about it. Because the way that it is right now, if you make any changes to your bids, or budgets during the day, they wouldn't actually kick in until midnight, UTC time that day, which could be many hours, if not, most of the day. As we were posting about this, a LinkedIn employee actually commented and said, this isn't how it's supposed to work. I'm gonna reach out to you, let's get those campaign IDs and we can investigate a little bit. So we are working with LinkedIn to figure this out. I hope this isn't the case. I hope our bids and budgets are actually done in real time, and that this was just a one off aberration. But I'm curious if any of you have experienced the same kind of thing too. It sounds like it might not be expected behavior, but we'll see. I want to highlight one review the user on Apple podcasts, Nosremetnarg, I hope I pronounced that right. I have no idea what that is. They said, "Such a great resource, the episode on AV testing." And then they had two minds blown emojis. Thanks so much for leaving that review. And for everyone else. If you haven't already, please do leave us a review. We put a whole lot of work and effort into releasing these podcast episodes. They're totally free. We don't get anything out of it. And so we hope that your fee in a way you can pay us back would be to go and leave a review. It would be sincerely appreciate it. And as a bonus, when you leave a review, I'm going to shout you out and feature you. 9:32 Okay, let's hop into our topic here, the cookie pocalypse. So to understand what's happening with the cookie pocalypse, we need to understand what a cookie is. And it's not very hard to understand. A cookie is just a little text file that a website will stick into your browser through JavaScript when you visit. Okay, so it's a little text file. But what does that text file potentially contain? Well, it contains a randomly generated and unique number that is used to recognize your computer and because As of that, since the website knows who it is that's communicating with, it makes things like online shopping and online banking totally possible. If you didn't have a cookie, if you added something to your shopping cart on an Ecommerce site, and then navigated to a new page, it wouldn't know it was still you and you'd lose whatever was in your cart. I think we can all agree that would be a really annoying user experience. 10:22 The cookie also contains the domain name of the website that actually created it. And a website can actually generate several cookies. It can also store things like user settings, such as your language preference, or special preferences, like how many items show up in a list when the page loads. For user experience, you definitely wouldn't want someone to have to come back and adjust that and change it every time they visit your website. So the cookie is going to help remember those things. The cookie file also is going to hold things like the time spent on the website, or individual sub pages, any data that you enter into forms, they can store as a cookie as well. So your email address, your name, your telephone number, maybe even the terms that you searched for on the site. And then quite a few other pieces of just normal metadata. Things like the expiration date of the cookie, and that kind of thing. So cookies were originally intended to be really helpful in just remembering you so that your user experience on websites was going to be better. And then analytics packages, like Omniture, which is now Adobe Analytics, and Google Analytics found that they could use the cookies to stitch activity together and follow the user journey. For instance, the analytics package can place a cookie on your browser when you arrive on the site. And then when you come back, it can report that you are a returning visitor, and then stitch both this session and the previous session together, since it now knows that these were the same person. So you're really building a profile about who someone is when they're visiting your website, even if you don't have them personally identified. And these were super helpful in stitching user behavior together over multiple sessions for things like your marketing automation system. So how this could work, let's say, and I'm a big fan of Les Miserables. So let's say we have user 24601. That's their unique identifier. They go to your website, and they look at an article. And then three months later, they come back and they look at another article. Well, your marketing automation system would know that this is the same person, because the first time that they came, you gave them a cookie. And then three months later, that cookie is still in their browser. And they can see oh, this is that same user. Then let's say two months later, they come back, they look at something else, and they fill out a form. Before that we only had users who for 601, we know that they visited two different pages. But now after they filled out a form, we've stitched that user together, we now know which two pages they've visited, as well as their name and email address that we collected from the forum. So now we're building this whole profile of which users on the website are more engaged than others. And if your sales team is looking for people to reach out to the engaged users are probably high on that list. And of course, ad platforms realize that they could retarget users based on their interactions with a website. So for instance, if I visit B to link.com, the LinkedIn pixel or the Insight tag it fires, and it's going to check to see if I have a cookie from LinkedIn.com. If it does, it's going to identify me as a LinkedIn member, which they know because they know which member that identifier represents. So then if be two links retargeting audience was set up within campaign manager to say anyone who visits the website, stick them into a retargeting audience, then it would add me. So then the next time I go to visit Linkedin.com, LinkedIn looks at the cookie, and it sees that I had visited B2Linked.com and understands that that should be in a retargeting audience, and then it can start serving me retargeting ads byB2Linked. And this is all really cool. I think the vast majority of people out there, even those who are really concerned with privacy, don't really have an issue with how this is all done. As it doesn't really feel like an invasion of privacy to me. It's more like just being able to cater a marketing experience to someone. But then you have cases where some really bad actors decided to exploit cookies in a way that took way too much data about users, and they even used it for invasive or unethical practices. And of course, when unethical behaviors happening, it's right for everyone to be up in arms and start creating legislation to shut it down. And I think it's important to understand that cookies were never meant to be the solution that they've become. They were created for things like remembering who someone is, but then they were co-opted later by marketing and other purposes, to try to do statistics and analysis that they were never really intended to do. So cookies have always been a little bit imprecise, a little bit problematic, but we've made do and there are two kinds of cookies. There's a first party cookie and a third party cookie. 14:52 So let's talk about the differences between those. First party cookies are highly trusted. When you're visiting a site that seit places a cookie in your browser. So for instance, if I go to LinkedIn.com, in my fresh browser, brand new installation, LinkedIn is going to put a cookie on my computer after I've logged in identifying me as AJ Wilcox, and associating that with my unique LinkedIn ID. That way, if I open up a different browser tab, it still knows it's me. Now this war on cookies is not directly targeting first party cookies. Although I believe that there are some casualties with this one that we'll go over. First party cookies only work on the website, which created them and they are considered essential cookies by data privacy laws. So this is great, because those of us who really appreciate the user experience that cookies provide, those are most often done with first party cookies. And we're likely not going to see anything changed there. But third party cookies are totally different. They're not nearly as trusted. This would be like if you visited B2Linked.com and then Linkedin.com placed a cookie in your browser. Which it can do because B2Linked has the LinkedIn insight tag installed. So technically, LinkedIn could do that they could place a third party cookie on your computer, when you're visiting our website. It's my understanding that third party cookies were mainly created for marketing and analytics. And so they started out innocent enough things like being able to just retarget you with certain ads, because you'd landed on a certain page before, I think most people would be okay with that kind of behavior. But then some really unethical marketers took it to the point of tracking users without their consent across the whole web, they can personally identify you, they can sell that information to data aggregators, and use it however they wish. And then really bad actors have even used third party cookies, to steal your identity to hijack your browser fill your newsfeed with propaganda, and all those things that maybe many of us remember spyware, adware that would infect your browser. So the war against cookies is really a war against third party cookies. You've always been able to go and clear your cookies, which is something I would do, if I were ever inundated by a certain kind of ad that I just didn't want to see anymore, I would jump into my browser and delete that cookie or just delete all my cookies. You can also serve in incognito mode, because that's not going to store the cookie past when you close that session. And the vast majority of browsers now have a mode called Do Not Track that you can turn on and it's just going to throw the cookies away. 17:22 All right, so then we have the cookiepocalypse. And this all originated from Apple. Because obviously, there's no reason for Google or Facebook to enforce privacy around cookies, because both of them own ad platforms that rely heavily on cookies. Also, Google owns Chrome, which means it can technically gather any behavioral data it wants, although Google claims to keep it very sparse on the collection of personally identifiable information in the browser. So those two brands highly invested in cookies. But then you have Apple who has no dog in this fight whatsoever, because it doesn't have an ad platform or a retargeting solution. So they took the angle of deciding to step up and become the consumer watchdog, your privacy guardian, and it's definitely good branding. If I were on Apple's team, I definitely would have been proud of this idea, too. But it definitely stepped on a lot of toes. Google, Facebook, and all pretty much digital marketing platforms around the world were all negatively affected here, the technology that they run on was under attack. So the way this worked is when Apple released the iOS 14 update the Safari browser, which is the main browser that all Apple devices use, it used something called ITP, or intelligent tracking prevention, to basically stop storing third party cookies. And in my opinion, this wasn't a huge deal, because so many people on Apple devices actually don't use Safari, they use the Chrome browser. So I didn't expect to see a ton of data loss. But then when Apple released the update for iOS 14.5, when it did was at the operating system level, it stopped storing third party cookies. So no matter which browser you are using, whether it's Safari, or Chrome or anything else, it would just block the third party cookies from being stored, regardless of the settings that you had in your browser. They were all overruled. So now any Apple device that's an iPhone and iPad, your MacBook Pro, would essentially stop providing accurate reporting data inside of analytics. And this is crazy because at least in the US, Apple traffic represents about half of all the traffic. So it's absolutely huge the effect that it has. And that's the reason that we're calling it the cookie pocalypse. That put a lot of pressure on all the other tech companies because they don't want to be seen as trying to take advantage of someone's privacy. So they all felt the need to follow suit. Mozilla Firefox was right behind positioning itself as the privacy first browser. And I'm fairly certain that this was the first browser to set up the ability to change it to a Do Not Track setting that told websites not to track the user. That eventually became the default. So then we lost tracking for Firefox users as well, regardless of which device they were using, if they were on a Windows or Android or whatever. Then Google Chrome stepped forward and did something that I was not expecting, back in January of 2020, it announced that it would block third party cookies by 2022. But then, in June of 2021, they delayed it until mid 2023, which is good because it's 2022 right now at the time of recording, and we still have a little while. And if you had asked me a couple years ago, I predicted that because Microsoft has become such an advocate for user privacy, that Microsoft Edge would have beaten Google to the announcement. But I never saw an announcement like that. And I think I figured out why I'm fairly certain that the Microsoft Edge browser runs off of the architecture called chromium, which as you guess it is the architecture of Google Chrome. So basically, Microsoft Edge, as soon as Google Chrome makes this change, Edge would follow suit automatically. And I'm obviously overgeneralizing what's happening here, because with Apple's logic of intelligent tracking prevention, it can decide whether to block a cookie or to accept it just based off of their own intelligence. So my understanding is that no cookie is really safe. ITP inside of Apple, or the logic within any browser can decide whether to block a first party cookie, or it could even on rare occasions, decide to keep a third party cookie. So if you run a website, one of the things that you can do to make your cookie more likely to persist is have a login on your site, since a user who logs into your site and gets a first party cookie to remember that. So the next time they come back, they don't have to enter their username and password for the 30th time is really helpful to users. And so Apple and all the browsers are going to be a lot more likely to keep that cookie because it represents being behind a login, which is already showing a lot of trust. I have an article down in the show notes that has a great breakdown of the logic that Apple's ITP takes with cookies, and you can go and compare that it's from a site called cookie saver.io. So here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into what this means for us as digital marketers. The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. 22:19 If you're a B2B company and care about getting more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, then chances are LinkedIn Ads are for you. But the platform isn't easy to use, and can be painfully expensive on the front end. At B2Linked, we've cracked the code to maximizing return on investment while minimizing your costs. Our methodology includes building and executing LinkedIn Ads strategies, customized to your unique needs, and tailored to the way that B2B customers buy today. Over the last 11 years, we've worked with many of LinkedIn's largest spending advertisers. We've spent over $150 million on the platform, and we're official LinkedIn partners. If you want to generate more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, book a discovery call at B2Linkedin.com/apply. We'd absolutely love to get to work with you. 23:08 Alright, let's jump into how this all applies to LinkedIn advertisers. There are a whole bunch of different marketing solutions that are affected by this. First off, I think we need to talk about analytics. You may have noticed that Google Analytics came out with GA 4 in pretty peculiar timing. It would have been really easy for Google to say because of what Apple's doing, we blame them. We're now trying to find a way around it with a new analytics platform. But Google took the high road, they don't blame Apple publicly. They just shared that they're building from the ground up because the old one had become a Frankenstein's monster. My guess is though, that GA 4 is very much connected to analytics and user tracking through a cookieless kind of world. What about conversion tracking, probably every ad platform you use has a conversion tracking element to it. The way this works with LinkedIn is that when you have the insight tag installed on every page of your website, when the visitor comes after clicking on an ad, it places a cookie in that user's browser. And that cookie identifies you as the same person who just clicked an ad on Linkedin.com. And now you're on another site. So when that user now visits a page of your website that is set up to fire a conversion, LinkedIn sees that user journey that this is the same person who recently clicked on an a, LinkedIn knows which ad, and then registers a conversion for that ad and that campaign, all within campaign manager. My understanding is that LinkedIn has converted all of its cookies from a third party cookie to a first party cookie, meaning it should persist and be respected a lot more. I don't know the technicality of how this works or why it works, but it sure sounds great. So it seems to me that if this is now a first party cookie, and even Apple devices have a cookie duration of seven days, that conversion tracking shouldn't be too badly affected. Even inside of a Safari browser. or someone can still click from ad to landing page to a thank you page and still have that all reported back to LinkedIn. That being said, we have seen a significant variation in click conversions reported in campaign manager versus the actual form fills that we find within the CRM. I love to hear if you guys are seeing the same thing with conversions in campaign manager being under reported, I know that LinkedIn is working on solutions behind the scenes trying to bridge that gap. But if what we're seeing right now is all Apple devices and we're seeing in effect, when Chrome stops accepting third party cookies in 2023, looks like midyear, we'll probably end up seeing twice the impact. So I can't overstate the importance of making sure that your form data is all flowing into your CRM because really, who cares about what the conversions number is inside the ad platform, if you have an actual record in your CRM with a name and an email. That's the only way as far as I'm concerned to make sure that you have 100% accurate way of tracking conversions. 26:02 Then we have retargeting solutions. LinkedIn is web retargeting is 100% reliant on cookies in your browser. So once third party cookies are gone without further development, I just don't see the technology even still working. I haven't heard anything from LinkedIn on this. And I do hope they're working on a variant that will live past 2023. But it's a little scary to me right now looking at the future of LinkedIn is website retargeting solution. So even if the LinkedIn insight tag places a first party cookie for retargeting purposes, I'm still not sure it can be reliably recognized for retargeting when they come back to LinkedIn, especially if it's outside of Apple's seven day cookie persistence window. What about the LinkedIn Audience Network? Well, the LinkedIn Audience Network or LAN, as they refer to it internally at LinkedIn, it's the ability to show your sponsored content ads to very specific users, even when they're not on Linkedin.com. So LinkedIn has a network of over 1000 really high quality sites and apps that it can show members ads on, it's great, and I highly recommend it. And if you remember from Episode 22, we talked about which sites and apps that LinkedIn Audience Network actually can reach. While I don't recommend the Audience Network on either Google or Facebook, I love it on LinkedIn. So the way that the LinkedIn Audience Network works from my understanding is that when you're logged in to linkedin.com, so obviously LinkedIn knows who you are, it places an identifier cookie in your browser. And then when you visit one of those partner sites, LinkedIn has a script on that page to check the LinkedIn cookie and see if there are any advertisers who are specifically wanting to target you. And then your inventory enters the auction for advertisers to target you. My thought is that this is negatively going to be impacted by the cookie pocalypse. But I'm just not sure how much it's being affected by it. I'm guessing that the LinkedIn cookie, even if it is first party, probably won't be able to reliably be read by those partner sites. Or if they can read that cookie, the first party cookie would be gone after seven days, if this isn't an active LinkedIn user who's logging in at least every seven days. So if that stops working, that would truly be sad. 28:10 Another one is that website demographics. We talked all about this one on episode 54. But one of the little appreciated features of LinkedIn is the free website demographics that you get just by putting the Insight tag on your website and letting it run. I actually call it LinkedIn analytics, because it's so similar to that of like Google Analytics, or Facebook analytics. What it does is it shows the professional makeup of those who are visiting your website. From my understanding, this works by the LinkedIn member having their Linkedin.com cookie in the browser, which is identifying who they are. And then your insight tag on your website, inspects that cookie, and then reports it back to LinkedIn, who you are. And because of privacy, obviously, they're not going to expose that to you, but they will aggregate that behind the scenes to show you general information about the different job titles who are interacting with your website, or which companies are coming the most often are the levels of seniority, etc. There's like nine different reports in there. And similar to LinkedIn, Audience Network and retargeting and any other products that relies on the LinkedIn insight tag and browser cookies, I don't know what the effect will be, but I'm guessing it's going to be significantly adversely affecting each of those products. And they may not be useful after like mid 2023. Since I love this product, I really do hope that LinkedIn finds a way to make it continue past the cookiepocalypse. 29:35 So now that I've totally scared you. Let's talk about the different actions that you can take in preparation for the cookiepocalypse. Remember I told you we were going to be full prepper on this episode. Get that tinfoil hat ready. Jump on down in the bunker. My first recommendation is around LinkedIn website retargeting. I'm predicting that after 2023 LinkedIn's website retargeting feature won't be nearly as reliable, but what that means If you want to take advantage of it now while we have it. I haven't been very bullish on LinkedIn's website retargeting in the past, just because it's weaker than other solutions. But boy, it's really capable of producing lower cost traffic on LinkedIn, and continuing to tell a segmented story. So I'm definitely a fan of it. Use it while you've got it. But in addition to that, LinkedIn has all of these event based retargeting features that happens just for those who are on the platform. And these have nothing to do with cookies, every action that someone takes on Linkedin.com. LinkedIn knows who they are and what action they took. So it's just keeping track on the backend. So I would highly recommend take advantage of things like single image ad interaction retargeting, or 25% video viewers, or form retargeting company page visits. If they're interested in a LinkedIn event, really anything you can take advantage of there. In the past, I've always recommended using Google and Facebook's retargeting features. And that certainly isn't changing here. Google and Facebook are by far the most advanced ad platforms on the planet. So I'm not sure how their tech is going to keep working. But if anyone is going to have a retargeting solution that works, it's going to be theirs. So definitely set up LinkedIn website retargeting, but also have Facebook and Google's as well. And then all your platforms can all hold hands and sing Kumbaya around the fire. You may notice that this is going to shrink the size of your audiences on LinkedIn from your retargeting campaigns. So you may find that you have to combine retargeting audiences just to get large enough list sizes. This obviously isn't great. But combining multiple lists is much better than just having retargeting audiences that won't run. If you've never paid attention to it, go check out website demographics now. If you have the LinkedIn insight tag installed, you've already got this make use of it. Now while the sun is shining. Because after cookiepocalypse is over, we don't know if this is still going to work. Similarly, use LinkedIn Audience Network in your sponsored content campaigns as much as possible before it may go away. Like I mentioned before, CRM tracking from your LinkedIn Ads is critical. If you don't have form fields coming from your LinkedIn ads being passed into your CRM with UTM parameters or other tracking parameters, informing you where those leads came from which ad they clicked, etc, you need to stop the presses right now and go get that set up. That is table stakes. There's another awesome feature on LinkedIn that isn't going to be affected by cookies going away. And that is the list uploads feature. You can always upload lists of individuals or company names for targeting or for exclusion back into LinkedIn. So make sure you are building your lists. When you own someone's email address, you can then do a lot with it, you can upload it into so many different ad platforms, as well as email them through your marketing automation solution. So build those lists, own that data. Because if you're just using LinkedIn targeting, you'll pay dearly, and you're just building on rented land. But there's so much more you can do if you actually own that data. 33:07 So let's get really technical. Here again, let's talk about the different alternatives to cookies that people are figuring out. One that I'm hearing a lot of advanced Facebook and Google advertisers doing is called server side tracking. There's a cool article all about this that we've linked to in the show notes by a site called Magic X. Sometimes it's called server to server or S to S, it works by cutting the user's browser completely out of the picture. Instead, the ad platform either Facebook or Google, in this case, it's going to cooperate right with your website's web server. It's capturing info about the user session directly from the server. So the ad platform, it's going to assign a unique identifier, because Facebook obviously knows exactly who you are. So they can link your identifier and your identity on their side. And then your website's server is going to receive that identifier and send information back to Facebook about the pages that it loaded during that session. And then when a conversion occurs, Facebook receives it right through its API. So there's no need to check the user's cookies in their browser or anything like that. This is the solution that the largest advertisers are using now. And there's a marketer by the name of Simo Ahava that I have great respect for. If you're running Google ads, there's an awesome article by him all about how to set up serverside tagging and tracking with Google ads inside of Google Tag Manager. So that's down in the show notes below at simoahava.com. Simo, if you're listening, huge fan. There's also another technology called fingerprinting. And again, really cool article about fingerprinting down in the show notes below. This one is by pixelprivacy.com, but fingerprinting works by the website creating a profile around each browser that's accessing this profile. It's a combination of your browser type, your browser version, your operating system, which plugins you have enabled, your timezone, language, screen resolution, and potentially a bunch of other active settings. And you might think that packaging this up is all pretty generic. But when you realize that any specific combination of all these browser elements is only going to occur about one in every 286,000 browsers, you can see how you might be able to consider it reliable as a marketer. And that's just the information about the browser to identify a user. So you can imagine a business could combine the browser fingerprint with its own data about you. So let's say that you fill out a form, they can then combine that data with now your name and email address, and then they can place you into some sort of a behavioral segment that they could follow up with. I don't hear a whole lot about fingerprinting. So it's possible that fingerprinting is even one of the things that server side tracking is using. But I don't know, that's a little past my paygrade. I do know that under GDPR, browser fingerprinting isn't illegal, at least not yet. So this is something that people are doing. I think server side tracking is so cool. I really wish we could do it on LinkedIn. So I hope LinkedIn releases a version of server side tracking that us LinkedIn advertisers can use. Bonus points if it makes the audience Network website demographics and retargeting more accurate. All right, I've got the episode resources party coming right up. So stick around. 36:25 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 36:36 All right, like we talked about here in the episode, there's an article by ionos.com all about what cookies are. There's the pixelprivacy.com article all about browser fingerprinting. There's a termly.io article all about first party versus third party cookies. There's the cookiesaver.io article all about how Apple's intelligent tracking prevention treats cookies. So if you're a site owner who deals with cookies, that's a great one to read. There's of course, the Simo Ahava article all about server side tracking with Google ads. And then we mentioned a few episodes, there's the website demographics episode, Episode 54, that you'll definitely want to check out if you haven't already. And then episode 22, we talk about all the different sites and apps that LinkedIn Audience Network can show up on. If you or anyone you know, is looking to learn more about LinkedIn Ads, point them towards the course that I did with LinkedIn Learning. It's of course linked to here in the show notes below and it's by far the least expensive and the most in depth course out there. If you're not already, subscribe to this podcast, if this was great info and you want to hear more geekiness about LinkedIn Ads in the future, hit that subscribe button. And then like I talked about before, please do rate and review the podcast. It makes a huge difference to me and I would be personally very grateful. If you have any corrections for us or suggestions for other episodes, or even feedback about the show, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Performance chart Demographics Audience segmentation Make optimizations Bidding/Budgeting AB testing NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.   Show Transcript What if I told you that I was going to lay out all the different ways that I handled LinkedIn Ads reporting and optimizations in one single episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show? interested? Let's go. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! One of the topics that we get the most questions on is reporting and optimization on LinkedIn. And it's simple enough to jump in and just build some ads build some audiences. But that means at some point, you have to analyze what you're doing, and decide what's working and what to do differently. This is an episode that was requested by one of our subscribers, Mark Bissoni, who's a digital ads pro in Chester, England. And in this episode, we're gonna go through how you can use all the data that LinkedIn provides, both within campaign manager, as well as some of the things that you can do once you get the data out of campaign manager and into Excel. And also, because building reports is such a visual thing, I'm going to do a series of videos on our YouTube channel, where I walk you through how to build each of the different types of reports that I'm talking about. So make sure you click the link in the show notes to our YouTube channel, and follow that so you can get notified when they get released. This week in the news, I just saw that the link to business manager appeared suddenly in the left hand navigation at the bottom of all of our accounts. So it may still be a feature that's rolling out if you don't happen to see it in your account yet, but it is coming and it's probably out for most. For those of you who don't know, what business manager is, it is LinkedIn is answer to Google's MCC, or multiclient center. Early on, it was a big challenge for agencies who advertised on Google, because they would have to go and grant every one of their employees access to the Google Ads account. And what was especially painful is that once a Google Ads account was connected to an email address, that email address, couldn't administrate or have access to any other Google Ads account. So Google came out with the multiclient center or MCC. And it's a group where you can have multiple accounts granted access to a single email address. And that's how agencies manage Google Ads. Facebook lots of years later came out with business manager. LinkedIn is very, very close to that. Obviously, LinkedIn is following in Facebook's footsteps most closely of all the platforms. And it's making it a lot easier for agencies to grant access to their team, just by adding their team member to one business manager account, instead of adding that same team member to every single LinkedIn ads account that you have. So this is something that the community has been asking for for a long time. And it's a great release. I want to highlight a review that came in this week. It was left by Gabe Harris, who runs Facqt Media, and they're a paid social agency out of Oakland, California. And I got to actually meet him when I was out on a trip to the Bay Area years ago, way cool guy. And he said, "Insightful LinkedIn expert. Indeed, this podcast is like having a LinkedIn ad coach for free. I love how generous AJ and his guests are in sharing their knowledge and expertise. I love how he leaves these experts to offer the best of their knowledge and experience to us listeners. Super insightful, we learned so much." Thanks so much gave, I really appreciate the kind sentiments there. That's exactly our goal. We treat this podcast like training for our own employees. And we don't hold back. I'm glad it's been good for you and your team as well. As a reminder, I love to give a shout out to those of you who leave reviews for us. So please take this as a sincere ask for me. If this show has been of any use to you, please do return us the favor by leaving us a review. I'd love to shout you out. Okay, let's hit it. Starting out with a little bit of a disclaimer, we may not touch on every single optimization or reporting case, but we're gonna hit a lot of the most common ones. We've definitely tried. But I'm guessing that we probably have 40 or 50 different reports that we've built for clients over the years. So my hope is we hit the major ones. But definitely if there's a type of report that we didn't hit on here that you'd like to use, please get in touch and let us know. So let's start out with the types of reporting that we can do from right within campaign managers dashboard. One of the things that I like to do is go in and look in the campaign's view. And I will sort the campaigns from high spend to low spend. What this does, it shows me in case I have limited time, let's say I only have five or ten minutes to look at campaigns in between meetings. If I sorta like this, I'm going to be immediately analyzing the five most impactful campaigns in the account because they're driving the most volume they're spending the most. Also big spenders is how you find out your most expensive mistakes that are going on. So this is a great way to analyze. It can also be really nice to sort your campaigns by click through rate from high to low, because then you're looking at the five most active audiences. Or if I'm looking to improve campaigns, I might sort from low to high. And it's that toggle is a little bit janky on LinkedIn. So basically, every time you hit one of those filters, you never know which way it's going to sort. But if you're looking at your click through rates from low to high, you're seeing those audiences that you may have created ads that aren't hitting the mark, that could be a good clue that those are good ones that you need to go in and adjust, launch new ad copy, consider different offers, really anything to get that back up and performing. If you're using LinkedIn lead gen forms, it can be nice to sort by cost per lead, or lead form completion rate from either high to low or low to high. If you're going high to low, you're seeing your top performers that you can maybe pour a little bit more gas on how to get that fire burning brighter, or the ones with the lowest could be a good one to either launch new ad copy, or consider if that might be the right audience for you. Another sort that we like to do is buy cost per click either high to low or low to high, looking at those audiences that are the most competitive. Plus, that can also show you opportunities if you're paying too much for clicks, that could be campaigns that you want to go in and try to launch ad copy that might be more engaging or evocative. Because if you can get click through rates up, your cost per click are likely going to come down. Now you can go in insert in campaign manager by ads the same way. The big challenge was doing this though, is that if your account is anything like the way that we run ours, you may have a lot of ads. And a lot of those ads might be similar to each other, or even exact copies. And so if you're looking at just your top five performing ads, and three of them are the same thing, it's not going to give you very much insight. So in the second half of the show, we're going to talk about exporting to excel, and the type of ad analysis that you can do there. So we'll wait on that one. But if you are running a very small account with few ads, few campaigns, you can still do this from right within campaign manager. The next area that could be helpful to you is clicking on performance chart. Now, Episode 52 goes into a lot of depth about what you can do with the performance chart. But I like to chart my click through rate over time, because that tells me if my ads are losing steam, people are tired of seeing them, they've saturated that audience. And I can actually see that in real time by charting over time. For budgeting purposes, it's also really helpful to chart your spend over time. If your account is really complex. It's a lot better to do this in Excel. But if you just need a quick look of like, oh, how was my account spending? Or how do my weekdays spend compared to my weekends, it's really nice to do that inside of performance chart. I also like to chart my costs per click over time to see are my audiences getting more competitive? Am I paying too much for any sort of audience, it can be a really valuable one to look at. If you're using LinkedIn lead gen form ads, I like to look at cost per lead, or even lead volume over time. If you were using conversions on the website, this doesn't make nearly as much sense, because there's oftentimes a lag in conversion showing up in the account, or sometimes not even showing up at all, as we're starting to understand what third party cookie is going away is is doing for all of our advertising efforts. But anytime someone fills out a form, LinkedIn knows immediately and so those lead counts are always accurate. Another reason why I don't want to use the performance chart to look at anything regarding conversions is that LinkedIn is definition of conversion is not one that I like to use. If you'll remember, LinkedIn is definition for conversions is all click conversions, plus all view through conversions. And I like to omit view through conversions from my calculations. And so this is a lot better to do by exporting to excel. And then you can use exactly the conversion that you want to use for that definition. One thing I wanted to try to chart inside of the performance chart is frequency. And what I was hoping to see is, as I continue advertising to an audience, how fast frequency climbs. Now, I might be dumb here, but I can't make sense of actually what that chart is showing. So if charting frequency over time in performance charts, if it makes sense to you, please do reach out and let us know how you use it. Like I said I've wanted to use it. I just haven't found a good use case for it. Next, go and click into your add demographics. And it's a button right next to performance chart right there in campaign manager. We went into a lot of depth on the demographics in Episode 54. But here's how we use it. So after we get feedback from a sales team, they'll oftentimes tell us which audience segments are making up higher quality leads or lower quality leads. So if we can look at the ad demographics and see how many of them are interacting with our ads, that could give us the ammo to go and add exclusion segments to our campaigns to get those lower quality folks out. We can also see which ones are high quality, and try to boost those campaigns, it is really important that you have a close feedback loop with your sales team, make sure you have a strong relationship there. It's some of the best advice I can give you as an advertiser. Another way that we like to use the demographics is let's say that you have a high click through rate over the course of a campaign. You can go in and look at who is doing the clicking here. And that can give you a good idea of the personas. Maybe it's certain job functions who are doing the majority of the clicking, or maybe it's seniorities, or job titles, but look at who is actually driving up your click through rates. Are they the right people or the wrong people. Because if you have a really high click through rate, but a low conversion rate, this is one way we can analyze and figure out why it could be that the offer isn't attractive enough. Or it could be your targeting that you're not hitting the right people. They might get to your landing page and realize that it's not for them and disqualify themselves. So double check inside your demographics tab. If it looks like you're hitting the right people, then that might be a clue that your offer needs some work, maybe optimize or change or adjust. But if you're not hitting the right people, your offer could be fine and you might not need to adjust anything there. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break. And then we'll dive into analyzing outside of campaign manager my absolute favorite, The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. If you're a B2B company and care about getting more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, then chances are LinkedIn Ads are for you. But the platform isn't easy to use, and can be painfully expensive. On the front end, at B2Linked, we've cracked the code to maximizing ROI while minimizing costs. Our methodology includes building and executing LinkedIn Ads strategies customized to your unique needs, and tailored to the way a B2B consumers buy today. Over the last 11 years, we've worked with some of the largest LinkedIn advertisers in the world. We've spent over $150 million on the platform and our official LinkedIn partners. If you want to generate more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, book a discovery call at B2linkedin.com/apply, we'd absolutely love to get to work with you. Alright, let's jump into the awesome analysis of ads and campaigns that you can do within Excel. So this may not be evident to everyone. But inside of campaign manager, you have that button that says Export. And if you're pretty good with Excel, chances are you've already used this button a lot. But we actually prefer exporting data rather than using LinkedIn's dashboard. Just because the data is a lot easier to see a bird's eye view and a lot easier to digest. It's also a lot easier to chart over time, because the performance chart is really limited in lots of ways. So here's how you actually get this data out. You click that export button in the upper right of campaign manager. Once you've selected the date range that you care about, then it's going to ask you what kind of report. There are quite a few options there so the two that I care about are ad performance and campaign performance. If I want to analyze my different ads, I go with ad performance. If I only care about the campaign's, then I'll do campaigns. Then it's going to ask you about your time breakdown. If you want to see trends over time, you need to do a time breakdown either by day or by month. And this will allow you to see your changes over time. But if you only need a snapshot of understanding, like what happened during the month of August, for instance, then you can just do time break down all time. Your best friend in Excel is going to be a pivot table. A pivot table allows you to combine all of a certain type of something and have it automatically do all the calculations of adding all that performance together. So if I have 15 ads running in an account, but it's actually only three ads duplicated five times with one pivot table, I can combine all similar ads into one entity. And then it will show me the performance of that ad all the way across the account, rather than having to add them all together myself. With any sort of report that I build in Excel, I'm likely going to add the columns of spend, impressions, click through rate, and cost per click. Spend is helpful to see what kind of volume something is driving. Impressions can be helpful in troubleshooting. But most of the time I'm going to use impressions in some ratio like click through rate or cost per impression. Now these are all metrics around the first hurdle that we talk about sometimes, where we're trying to understand how effective our ads are at getting attention. That's our first hurdle we need to get prospects over is getting them to actually click on the ads. I like to use the color scale in Excel, and color code each of these columns by low to high. So I can visualize a lot easier, which campaigns tend to have higher costs or higher click through rates, then the columns I start to analyze. The second hurdle is what we need to get prospects over is to get them to take some sort of an action that we want like to convert. So I'm going to add things like conversions. And like I mentioned before, I'm going to use click conversions, not just LinkedIn's combined definition of conversion, with view through conversions included. I also want to see conversion rate, but I'm going to build my own formula for that, which if you watch our YouTube videos here that we're going to release, you'll see why. I also want to look at cost per conversion. Now, if the only data you have is data from LinkedIn's campaign manager, then this is as far as you go, you've got both of those hurdles. The click and engagement metrics, as well as the conversions metrics and you can do some cool analysis here. But if you are a master advertiser, Surely you've connected your LinkedIn ads data with your CRM data to allow you to do things like a calculation of what's my cost per marketing qualified lead, or my cost per sales qualified lead, or cost per proposal given or cost per closed deal, that will tell us my ROI. If I have that data, I also want to look at graduation rate from MQL to SQL, or SQL to proposal or close rate, because that's going to teach me if I have one campaign that looks good on a cost per lead, but only 20% of MQLs are becoming SQL files, but my average is more like 50%, then I know there's something wrong with that audience, either the way that we're presenting to them, or the way we're targeting them, or the way that sales is nurturing them. It's also really nice to get counts of your number of MQLs, or SQLs, or proposals, or close deals from your LinkedIn Ads efforts. And one of the coolest things about a pivot table in Excel is that you can just bring new metrics down into your pivot table, to break out your audiences or break out anything that you care about to look at it separately. So for instance, if I'm looking at a whole bunch of campaigns, it's not going to be very meaningful to me, if a text ad campaign has a really low click through rate, and a sponsored content campaign has a really high one. They're just not even on the same playing field. But if I take ad type, and I move it down into my rows, now it will group all of my campaigns by ad type, along with its own nice little summary. And now I can measure my different ad types differently because they all act very differently, they deserve to be treated separately. I also really like to break out these reports, if I'm doing AB tests. So if I could break my As separately out from my Bs, then you can very quickly tell what's working and what's not working, what sort of messaging you can do, there are some great insights you can get from doing that. You could also do a cohort analysis, where let's say you launched new ads this week. And you want to look at how this cohort compares to your last cohort, maybe you launched ads a month ago or two weeks ago, you can then compare them very easily with a pivot table. If you're running multiple offers, it's really nice to segment by offer, so that you can figure out very quickly which offer is performing like we want, which one is not. And if you've segmented your audiences, like we recommend in your account, you can now pull certain things out of the campaign name, allowing you to do these micro segments where you break them out. So you could break out all performance by seniority, or by the industry that you're targeting, or by company size. You can break things out by geography, assuming that you have different campaigns for each geography, you can compare different job titles or different job functions. So this is one that we really liked to do. But it does require that ahead of time you've micro segmented all of your audiences. And if you want to learn how we do that, that's episode 65 so you can go and do the same thing in your accounts. And just another note on combining data from your CRM. In order to do this, you do need to track all of your ads with UTM parameters or some sort of URL parameter. And that's how you can then marry your performance data from LinkedIn to your CRM data. HubSpot actually does a really good job of doing this naturally. So if you're already using HubSpot, you may already have this done for you without having to do anything else. On our own campaigns. We have UTM tracking and leads coming in. But sometimes we'll get leads that have no source of UTMs. But we do have one extra barrier here. We asked on our form, how did you hear about us, and fairly regularly, we'll see people say that they heard about us from LinkedIn Ads, but they didn't come in with tracking parameters. So what that tells us is likely people are seeing and maybe even clicking on the ads, but they're just navigating to our homepage and contacting us there. So it's nice that we don't have to pay for that click for sure if they're not clicking, but it does muddy our data a little bit, because those leads aren't directly attributable to the exact ad or the exact campaign. But in marketing, we do have to get used to that. We do have some attributable results. So just learn how to take that in stride. When we have this data, I do like to look at the different campaigns or audience segments that brought in closed one deals. If we're at the beginning of a campaign, we might not see closed deals happening super quickly, because we're still pushing people through the funnel. But if we've been working with someone for a year, lots of times, we're going to have plenty of that data that we can share, we can also see the individual ads or ad messaging that's driving either a lot of sales qualified leads, or proposals or close deals, we can see the campaign's or the audiences that tend to drive them the highest quality. And of course, once you've been running long enough to have closed deals, then you can do that amazing ROI calculation. That's done by just taking the closed deal value and dividing it by the spend, your organization might want to do a fully loaded ROI calculation. So it's maybe what you're paying for a sales rep to close the deal, maybe what you're paying for an agency to manage it, maybe even your own salary as an internal employee. So just find out from your boss, what sort of ROI calculation they want to see. So let's talk about some of the actual analysis that you can do. One of the things that we've done with one of our clients is, they came to us with a goal, they wanted us to average a $40 cost per lead. And when we very first started working with them, they might have been up in the 50s, and maybe even 60s. And over time, we've been able to optimize those down within range and even below their goal. But even if you don't know the goal that you want to work with, you can definitely just find your current average, and look at the things that are performing below average, and try to cut those out. And then look at the things that are performing above average, and feed those. And what that's going to do is it's going to incrementally improve your performance, it's going to bring your average cost per lead, or whatever metric that you're optimizing towards, down steadily. So what we might do in this case, we might get a report of all of the different campaigns in the account into a spreadsheet. And then we're gonna sort or color by either the highest performing or the lowest performing of campaigns in all the different metrics. In this case, we were looking at a cost per lead. But you could do the same thing with a click through rate or a total spend. And as we're sorting and color coding, what we're looking for are the weak spots. Eric Jones, who's our Director of Marketing, told me, "The reason why I love this is because it helps you find inefficiencies in your ad account." If you have certain campaigns or ads driving costs up, or volume down, for example, you can improve account efficiency by pausing them, or lowering bids and allocating your budget to those that are performing well. So Eric shared a couple of these levers, but think about what are the different levers in your account that control the weak spots that you found. We did a whole episode on optimization tactics. So if you haven't listened to it already, go listen to episode 50. But likely, what you're going to find is you have a handful of campaigns with really high cost per lead, and a handful with really low cost per lead. And if you want to decrease your cost per lead, you want to increase the spend and volume on those that are performing really well. And then restrict the spend that's happening from the higher costs, and then your whole average cost per lead is going to drop. So what are those levers that you can pull? Well, if it's the high performers that you're looking to feed, can you possibly give them more budget, if they are budget restricted? This might be as simple as just increasing your budget on those high performing campaigns, and you just get more coming out. Can you bid them higher without killing their efficiency? So let's say the cost per lead is 20% below average, if you increase your bids by five or 10%, you're still going to be performing below your average cost per lead, which is great. And you'll just get more volume out of it. Maybe you can narrow down what's the best performing ad copy that you're using, and scale that out. So it's running in more campaigns, or you're doing more like it? How about we look at the poor performers, and we're looking for ways to starve them. Eric mentioned a little bit of this, but one of the biggest levers we have is to lower bids. Of course, you can always shut a campaign off. But a lot of the time, it can be better just to lower bids rather than pause. So let's say that you have a really high conversion rate, but you also have a high cost per lead. What that means is you're paying too much, and it could be that you're bidding too high. Anytime our cost per lead is higher than we like, but not egregious. We can always just incrementally lower bids. And of course, my favorite part about this is, as you lower your bids, your account efficiency increases, while your volume gets cut a little bit. Another option you can do to start lower performers is to lower your budget. So, if their bids are already at the floor, and you're still spending too much, then it could be a good idea to lower your budgets. And this is, especially if you have great click through rates and a small budget, you'll probably run into this. If you're not touching your bids at all, this is kind of a lazy or a short term fix to lower your budget. You usually want to lower your budget, at the same time as you're lowering bids if you can. If you're already bidding at the floor or something, obviously, you can't. I mentioned pausing entirely. Now, I don't like doing this usually, because it's a big move, it's giving up on something entirely, and it's shutting off data that you could be using to learn. Episode 65 is all about micro segmenting campaigns, as we talked more about this, so go listen to that if you haven't already. But if you have a continued track record of poor performance, and you've already done a lot with it, you've already lowered bids, you've already lowered budgets, you've already changed and tested a whole bunch of new things. If you have sufficient data to tell you that it's not working, that's a good clue that you can actually pause a whole campaign or a set of ads entirely. Also, if sales or marketing says that an audience isn't valuable, or isn't high quality down the sales process, then it almost doesn't matter what the data says about how people are interacting with the ads, you're probably free to just pause it. Every once in a while we'll have a client come to us and they'll say, hey, my boss just cut our budget so we have half the budget to work with this month. And in that case, you can go through the worst performers, and just temporarily pause those. And what's cool about that, again, is your overall efficiency for the account increases while your budget got cut. Now, as you're going through and analyzing inside of Excel, you're gonna come across different scenarios, that might be a little confusing, or you might not know what to do with them. So let's go through a couple of those crazy off the wall situations that you'll see. One might be you have a really high cost per click, and a high click through rate. The high click through rate means that you should be able to lower your costs. So you can try bidding down or changing your bidding strategy. But if you lower your bids, and your click through rate goes down as well, it means that you're probably bidding for the right spot in the ad inventory and you're essentially paying a premium for that placement. What about if you have a low click through rate, but a high conversion rate? How would you handle something like that? What that tells me is usually the offer, or the call to action is really good, but the ad messaging might need some help. Maybe we're not properly communicating to people what the value of clicking on that ad is. If you're having a hard time generating clicks at a healthy rate, then it's probably something to do with your ad. Or in the case of not getting any impressions, it could be that your bids are just not competitive enough. What about those high volume campaigns? So let's say that you have a strict volume goal, your department is telling you, we need 200 leads per month out of LinkedIn, for instance. Well, if you look and you have one campaign that's driving half of all of that, even if the cost per lead is higher than your goal, you might be okay just continuing to run that high volume campaign, just to not disrupt your volume. In this case, meeting your goals is probably more important than account efficiency. But if you do need to adjust to get higher efficiency, make small adjustments to this campaign, you don't want to kill the golden goose that's laying all those golden eggs. You can try going into the other campaigns on the account and trying to improve performance there while leaving the big driver alone. What about if you have high performance, but you're not getting good volume from it. One of our most listened to episodes is episode six, about bidding and budgeting. That is gospel that you should go and study if you haven't already, but in this case, one of the strategies you can use is going to increase your bids, because that's going to make you more competitive in the auction and all of a sudden your ads are going to be shown to more of the people in that audience that you might not be reaching. If you are budget constrained, which you definitely shouldn't be budget constrained, if you're really on top of things. But if you are, it could be as simple as just increasing the budget on those high performing campaigns that aren't getting enough volume. If it's due to small audience size, let's say the audience that you're targeting has really good performance. But there's only 3000 people in that audience. One thing you could do is you could go try to increase your audience sizes. Now I'm not recommending that you target people who aren't relevant to your audience. But if you can find people who are still relevant that you can add to the audience, all the better. You could also go and test into new audience segments. So analyze the targeting that you're using and See if there's any type of targeting that you're not using to reach your ideal customer profile. If it's a click through rate issue where you're not getting enough traffic from an audience, you could go and borrow what's working well, in other campaigns, maybe there's different ad copy or different offers there that are getting a higher click through rate, and you can move them over and test them to this audience. Now, most of that analysis that I'm talking about has been around campaigns. But like I mentioned earlier, you can analyze your different ads as well. So pivot tables are definitely going to be your friend here. I like to add either the intro or the headline, whatever is staying the same across all of the different ads you're running. I like to add them into my columns. Now I'm combining the performance of each ad individually to compare against the other ads, then I'm going to be comparing things. Whatever AB test I'm running, but I'm going to be comparing, like motivation against motivation, or call to action versus call to action, image versus image, all kinds of different things. And go back and listen to episode 36. That's all about ABX testing if you want more ideas there. 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. Like I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, go subscribe to the B2Linked YouTube channel, because we're going to put videos up here over the next coming weeks and months, showing exactly how we do some of these analyses. I wanted to talk you through it here. But obviously, it's a very visual thing to be working inside of Excel. So go subscribe to the YouTube channel and get notified as they come out. We also released a blog post all about navigating the LinkedIn campaign manager dashboard. So if you don't know where to click on some of these things, check out the link for that in the show notes below. Go read that blog post, it'll be a great one. The episodes that I mentioned here in this episode, there's the performance chart, that's episode 52. There's the Add demographics episode, that's episode 54. There's audience segmentation, Episode 65. There's optimization strategies, that's episode 50. There's bidding and budgeting, which is episode six. And of course, the one we just most recently mentioned, is the AB testing episode, Episode 36. Now, if you or anyone you know, is looking to learn more about LinkedIn Ads, go check out the course that I did with LinkedIn Learning. It is by far the highest quality and the lowest cost course out there, you can't go wrong. The link for that is right in the show notes below. Also, if you liked what you heard, it probably goes without saying, but do subscribe on using whatever podcast player you're on. And I'm saying this seriously, if you've gotten any sort of value out of this show listening, your fee is to leave us a review. It would sincerely mean a lot to me and all of us here at B2Linked who work so hard on the show. So please don't just think everyone else is gonna go do it. I want you to go leave us a review. That would be the best way you can say things with any questions, suggestions, corrections, anything, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Google and Facebook Bidding/Budgeting Lead Gen Forms Testing Strategy NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.   Show Transcript So you're hiring a new LinkedIn advertising manager and you want to train them right? We're talking about proper training around LinkedIn Ads on this episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. We face pretty significant challenges when we're trying to hire someone who's responsible for LinkedIn Ads. And this is especially compared with all the other major ad channels, because most digital marketers come into the marketing industry with some sort of experience in either Google or Facebook Ads. So when you're like us, and you're specifically trying to hire for experience in LinkedIn Ads, you'll likely find that it's hard to hire someone with any sort of solid experience. And if you can't find someone with existing experience, you probably need to end up training them yourself. So this episode is all about how to get someone up to speed with LinkedIn Ads quickly and with very little drama. And as you might guess, this is the same process that we actually use when training internally as well. In the news, I have to apologize, because it's been about a month since the last episode, but I have good reason for that. I got to engaged. And my life has been a little bit of a whirlwind around that happening with all the planning for and now wedding planning. And we're currently planning for a wedding on September 23, of this year of 2022. So I couldn't be more thrilled. Thanks, everyone, for letting me share this little experience. I also wanted to share a review that was recently left, the username is choerauf. And they said, "Amazing resource. I have years of experience in digital marketing and paid ads. But when my new job was heavy on LinkedIn advertising, I knew I needed a resource to get myself up to speed on how best to use LinkedIn. This show has been everything I needed and more." Thanks so much for leaving that I really appreciate that. It's this kind of feedback that keeps me running the show, I do want to ask a special favor of everyone out there who's listening. If you have gotten any value out of this show, please go leave a review. It takes a lot of work to put these episodes together. And leaving a review is how you can say thanks if you've gotten any sort of benefit out of it. So please take this as a serious ask and favorite that you can do for me and go leave a review. All right. With that being said, let's get on to the topic. Let's hit it. So if you yourself are the one who was training, I think there are some things that you as a trainer should know. And first on that list is just realize that whoever you're training, no matter how experienced they are in digital marketing, sometimes they may be more experienced than you in number of years. Or maybe they're far less. Just realize they don't know what you do plan on going all the way back to the basics. And don't assume that they know something that you think is simple. In digital marketing, we use a lot of acronyms. People will call it alphabet soup. And it happens a lot where we just say things that are meaningful to us. But if others don't know what we're talking about, they are immediately alienated and tend to zone out very quickly. And you definitely don't want someone to zone out because we already have to repeat things in training lots of times. For my experience and training, normally, people retain about 10% of what they're being taught. And of course, every time you learn something, you're going to gain a little bit larger a base of what's going on. So your learning will be exponential. Remember that LinkedIn ads is a very complex platform. And it can feel like they're trying to take a drink from a firehose. So much coming at them all at once. And it's going to be hard to retain. So make sure that you as the trainer are being extremely patient, you're willing to repeat things as often as they need to be, and you're doing your very best to break down very complex topics, and elements of the platform and concepts into just the very, very basics. I like to separate roles into those that are more strategic versus those that are more tactical. So generally, if I'm going to be training someone on how to take on LinkedIn Ads, I'm going to train them at the very tactical things, things like how to write ads, how to manage bids and budgets in the platform, how to launch a new ad, how to create a new campaign, those types of things. And then me myself as the trainer, I'm going to take on myself, the more strategic types of tasks, that would be things like determining budgets ongoing and ensuring that we're not overspending a budget, determining which offers to run, you get the idea. And that means that you should know and you should be up to date on the latest trends, the changes, the new strategies that are and aren't working with LinkedIn Ads. You can't expect your new hire to pick up on those things. They're still trying to understand the basics of the platform. You still will need to exhibit quite a bit of oversight. It can help to make a list of all of the things that you think your trainee ought to know about LinkedIn Ads by the end of the training. You have a big bulleted list here, make sure that your training is aimed at knocking down every one of those points. And it's a really good idea to follow up with exercises, or maybe even your own quiz questions that you could ask them to make sure that they are paying attention and are absorbing what it is you're teaching. So now let's go on to the types of things that you might want to be training your new trainee on. Depending on where they come from, and how much marketing experience they have, you may want to zoom out and talk about just the differences between business to business versus business to consumer. How business to consumer are usually lower budget, and impulse purchase decisions. While B2B purchase decisions are usually done with higher budgets over longer periods of time and made by a committee. You'll likely want to talk about the differences between Facebook and LinkedIn because even though both of them use a lot of the same terminology, the platforms are vastly different, and really should be treated differently. And that's talking about two different social platforms. When you start comparing to things like search, like Google Ads versus LinkedIn, it's even that much more different. Make sure you go back to episodes eight and nine of this podcast, because those talk all about the differences between Facebook and LinkedIn and Google and LinkedIn. In order to help your trainee understand and absorb more of what's being taught, it's a really good idea to let them know what this is actually doing for them and doing for their career. Because if they perceive this as being an investment in themselves and their career, they're going to pay a lot closer attention. So talk to them about why they would want to learn LinkedIn, as opposed to other channels, or when they would use it. I tell you for certain that there's a market outlook for those who know LinkedIn ads. Well, people reach out to me all the time asking, Hey, do you know of anyone who has LinkedIn ads experience and is looking, it's a highly sought after skill, you may not see it all the time in job postings out there, but realize that it is a skill that if you're in B2B, it's going to be highly sought after. Now, once they're convinced that LinkedIn is the right ad channel for them, there are some resources that they can very quickly get caught up on. The first is that LinkedIn Learning course that I talked about, at the end of every episode. Make sure to send them that way because it's a very quick way to get caught up on all the basics of LinkedIn Ads for very inexpensive and it's not long. The course is like an hour and a half and that's it. And you may already have a subscription to LinkedIn Learning. But if you don't buying that course, individually is is like 15 bucks or something like that. It's extremely inexpensive, especially for the quality of the course. The second resource here is actually this podcast. So if you're listening to this right now, chances are you already get the value here. But this is something that you could assign to your training to make sure that they start listening to the back catalogue of episodes. And that can be a great way to turn them into a very advanced advertiser very quickly. The third resource is the B2Linked newsletter and blog. And I feel like a little bit of a shill when I'm talking to you about all of the B2Linkked resources. But honestly, I haven't found very many good LinkedIn Ads specific resources out there. So if I knew of anything good that I really approved of, and I liked the content, I would definitely share it. But I just don't see anything out there like that yet. If you have the trainee go to B2Linked.com. Just look around for the newsletter link. And they can get signed up for there. But another good tip that you can use is to tell them to come and follow me on LinkedIn, because I'm constantly sharing everything that I'm learning about LinkedIn Ads, and constantly sharing great stuff. So if they just follow me or even send a connection request, I'd love to be connected to them. And we are in the process of coming out with more advanced and further courses past just what you could find in the LinkedIn Learning course. So watch for those as they come available. Now let's go over some of the types of things that you may want to train on. And again, remember that repetition is going to be key here. You can't expect someone, unless they have photographic memory, to just immediately internalize everything you're sharing. So plan on repeating yourself, just like I have on this particular point. Now, these things to train on aren't necessarily in any particular order. 9:17 The first here is to train on all the different targeting criteria that LinkedIn has and what's available. This can be as simple as going into campaign manager, creating a new dummy campaign, and then just clicking through all the different options that you see there for targeting. Just let them spend some time and look at what LinkedIn allows you to target by I also recommend having your training practice by building campaigns from scratch using different criteria that you might give. So you might say hey, here are five campaigns that I want created. One of them I want to be targeting marketers in higher seniorities. One I want to be targeting IT folks of lower seniorities. One I might want to target these two specific job titles, you get the idea. And then give them practice putting together campaigns that utilize all these different targeting criteria. So as they get this experience, trainees can better nail down all that LinkedIn has to offer. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break. The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. We as marketers want to be where our customers are. If you're a B2B company, chances are LinkedIn is the channel you want to be on. But this is a platform that's both expensive and cumbersome by nature. It takes an expert to tame the beast that is LinkedIn Ads. We've learned the ins and outs of LinkedIn Ads for the past 11 years. We spent over $150 million on the platform. We are official LinkedIn partners and so you'll only be working with LinkedIn Ads experts from day one. Apply to work with us on the contact page of B2Linked.com. We'd absolutely love to work with you. Alright, let's jump back into it. One of the biggest challenges to advertisers is understanding the bidding and budgeting strategies around LinkedIn. Help them understand the difference between bids and budgets, and all the different types of bidding, whether maximum delivery, or manual bidding, and how all of these help control costs. And if you're not up to speed yourself, go check out episode six of this podcast that's all dedicated to bidding and budgeting. It is by far one of the table stakes for making sure that you know what you're doing on LinkedIn Ads. Once they have experienced creating campaigns, I would have them practice manually creating and launching ads. And even if you have another way of launching ads, for example, we internally we have our own bulk tool that we can vote create ads, we still have all of our trainees build them from scratch manually in the platform, just to get comfortable with what's available to you inside of campaign manager. It's also helpful just in case your tool ever breaks that they know a second way of doing it. Have them practice putting together different types of ads. So for instance, putting together a conversation ad, it's a lot more complicated than a text ad. And of course, single image ads are a little bit more complex than a text ad, but not too much. Give them practice creating and managing lead gen forms, just in case you're running any lead gen form campaigns, this will be helpful. A lot of it's just understanding how the leads flow into LinkedIn, and then how they flow to whatever CRM you're using. And episode 16 of this podcast is all about LinkedIn lead gen forms, so that can be a good resource for you to brush up on, and even assign that as required listening. You'll also want to have them practice creating conversions, in case you're doing conversion tracking on your website. And so much of what your advertising is doing is trying to convey an idea. It's trying to compel people to take whatever action you're asking. And there's a lot of psychology behind that, obviously. But the way that that rubber actually meets the road is through ad copy. So spend some time training them on how to write good ad copy. If you don't have a designer on the team, train them to use basic graphic design tools, like Canva, or even something a little bit more advanced like Photoshop, if you have access to that we find Canva is usually plenty for creating a basic ad, like a single image ad. And even if it doesn't actually end up being in use, it's a good idea just to have them create copies, so they know how it all works. You'll want to teach them organization and account structure, train them on ad performance and data analysis. That's looking at the performance of your different campaigns of your different ads and trying to understand what works and what doesn't. You'll want them to understand both natively in LinkedIn, how to assess performance, as well as exporting that performance out into Excel and doing spreadsheet based reporting. You want to establish with them a testing strategy and a cadence. How often are you testing things? How do you know when a test is finished? Episode 57 of the podcast goes all over a testing strategy. So that would be a good one to review yourself, as well as assigned to your training. You also know what good performance looks like in your own account. So train them on what the optimization process looks like, what benchmarks to compare against, and what they should be looking for, for good performance and where they should be looking for bad performance to turn it around. So figure out what do you yourself care about when you look at it inside the account? And how do you spot those things? Teach them how to scroll through in campaign manager and find dips in performance or optimization opportunities. Make a list of what changes you tend to make in an account. Are you mostly refreshing ad creative? Are you testing new ads? Are you constantly testing new offers? These are great things to train your account manager on. As someone who's done a lot of training, I highly recommend that you come back every so often, and quiz them as to what you're talking about, just so that they can't just nod their heads and say that they're getting it, but they're not actually getting it. Because it's not in their best interest to just glaze over and miss what you're teaching. And it's certainly not in your best interest either. So make sure you're quizzing them along the way. And also realize you don't want to train too heavily. You want to take breaks and give time and exercise patience. Because this may seem really simple to you, because you've been doing this for a while. But for someone brand new. Like we've said, this can be like trying to take a drink out of a fully blown firehose. Give them time to ask questions, give them time to talk through theory, and then take mental breaks. So some of these concepts can sink in, then there are some things that I highly recommend as your training you're going to hammer in. So make sure that they really understand budget control, because the biggest risk that you have, if you're an agency is overspending a client's budget. And the biggest risk you have internally is also overspending your budget. In both cases, it's not a good look. Most new marketers aren't really ready for the theory yet. They're still dwelling mostly in the tactical. So don't be afraid to teach them the tactical, but give them the overall theory and teach them and clue them in as you see opportunities because that's eventually where you want them to get is understanding the theoretical and the strategic of LinkedIn Ads, so that they understand how each of those tactics that you're teaching them fit in and when they're useful. Expect that unless they're super experienced marketers, they probably won't see the whole picture yet. So coach them and try to teach them the whole picture. What I found is as your teaching tactics, it tends to be a little bit like throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. But as soon as they start to understand the theory of what's going on, they'll start to get it and they'll understand and create their own tactics. But you will need lots of repetitive training and having them do basic building and basic tactics before you can really unleash more theory on that. Okay, 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. 17:34 Okay, like we talked about during the episode, if you go back to episodes eight and nine, they talked about the differences between Google and LinkedIn, and Facebook, and LinkedIn. And they're great fundamental episodes. Also, Episode six is all about bidding and budgeting. You'll see that here listed in the show notes. Episode 17 is all about lead generation forms. And episode 57 is all about testing strategy. These are all great ones for both you and your training. Check the link in the show notes below for the LinkedIn Learning course that I did for LinkedIn. It's all about the basics of LinkedIn Ads. And it's a great way to get someone started on the right foot. Plus, it's extremely inexpensive, and really, really high quality. Make sure to subscribe on whatever player you're listening to. If this is your first time, welcome, welcome. We sure love having you here. And if this is not your first time, please do consider any sort of value that we've given you in the podcast. And please leave us a review on your favorite podcasting platform. It really helps. It's not just something we say. With any suggestions, questions, or even corrections about the show, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Mark Williams on LinkedIn LinkedInformed Podcast linkedinformed.com NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.   Show Transcript AJ Wilcox Going viral on LinkedIn, it's easier than you think. We're talking about viral content on LinkedIn on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. AJ Wilcox 0:19 Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. I've said for years that LinkedIn is the easiest network to go viral. And this is because so few people post compared to how many people there are there. The last stat I heard, this is back from 2019. But there were only 4% of members who post, but 100% of us need content full in our feeds when we log in. So it's definitely in LinkedIn best interest to share our content with those who aren't even in our network, I get asked all the time about virality, even though I'm the LinkedIn Ads guy, and I want to share my top information source on this so that you're hearing it right from the source. Mark Williams is the host of the LinkedInformed podcast. And it's my main source of information about the organic side of LinkedIn. He's known as Mr. LinkedIn for good reason. He's widely regarded as one of the world's top LinkedIn experts. He lives in the UK so I know you're going to enjoy his buttery smooth accent. I love his fresh and unbiased attitude about LinkedIn. And I know you'll appreciate it, too. Let's hit it. AJ Wilcox 1:25 Mark, I'm so excited to have you here. Just so everyone knows Mark Williams is a close friend of mine, we actually got to hang out in the UK last time I was there. We're both into cars. So we've got to go a tour of the Aston Martin factory because I'm a big Aston Martin fan, big exotic car guy. And it was great to get to hang out in person quite a bit. Mark, I would call you one of the top LinkedIn experts, especially on the organic side. I'm a huge fan of your podcast. So thank you so much for coming on the show. Mark Williams 1:53 It's a pleasure. And I'm delighted to be here can't wait. You reminded me of a time when we met at the Aston Martin. And I do like cars, but not quite to the degree that you do. In fact, one of the things that we all love about you, AJ is your natural enthusiasm for most things, really. But when it comes to cost, particularly Aston Martin's, yours goes through the roof. I distinctly remember a conversation when this guy who clearly was enthusiastic about cars, as you was talking about a camshaft I think it was. And I remember thinking, yeah, I like cars, but this is perhaps pushing the limit for me. But you were truly enthusiastic. AJ Wilcox 2:38 I'll tell you, I do not own an Aston Martin. And I certainly hope by the end of my life. Problems is I have young kids. And if any of them ever scratched that car that is pure art. I don't think I could contain myself. But I will memorize the names and the zero to 60 times and top speeds and stuff at the best of them. Mark Williams 2:55 It's time to get an Aston Martin is when your kids are teenagers, because then you can take them to school. And you know, there's lots of benefits for them in that. AJ Wilcox 3:02 Oh, totally. Yeah. Cool. Well, I'd love for you just to tell us a little bit about yourself. All obviously in the intro, I've given you a full read of your bio. But tell us about yourself anything cool that we should know, Mark Williams 3:16 My background prior to LinkedIn training, I started doing some training in 2008. So quite a long time really. Coming up to 14 years that I've been doing this, which is actually the longest job I've ever had. Having said that I was in my career before that was all in recruitment and recruiting. And so I was 19 years in that industry. But the longest time with any one company was 12 years. So 14 years working for myself now beats that. And I guess an interesting story about me that perhaps tells more about me than perhaps going through the factual bio stuff is that I was not particularly well educated started in recruitment, which was a very sales orientated environment, a very high pressure, sales orientated environment when I first joined it, and it was survival of the fittest, and it suited me well, because I was a bit of a fighter really, you know, in that I could get out there and make things happen and work harder than anybody else. And all of the things that that were strengths of mine very much appealed or played into that kind of role. And I was hugely ambitious, worked and worked and worked and worked my way up through that industry to end up running a business. And it was a thoroughly enjoyable and highly rewarding stage of my career. But by the time I left it in 2008 I had completely lost myself and I have many faults, but one of my biggest faults but also my biggest strength is I'm not a quitter, right. You would typically think that's a good thing, but it's not a good thing when you end up doing a job that you really hate. Because you don't want to give in and that's what happened to me. And probably the last four or five years of my time in recruitment, I was a different person, deeply unhappy, went through a divorce at that stage as well. Not many people talked about mental health in those days. But if they had to do another been a candidate for being in a pretty bad state, and leaving that, and long story, which I won't go into, but the company was taken over, the new people didn't want me involve a business that I kind of saw as being mine, but wasn't actually mine, was taken away from me. And like, my baby was ripped from my arms if you like. And that together with the kind of self esteem issues that happen when something like that happens to hit me really hard. But it was also the best thing that ever happened to me, because I had to dig deep find myself, again, build a business from nothing. And I'm really proud of the fact that I did that. But more proud of the fact that I came back to being the Mark Williams that I was many years before that. And the reason I'm telling you this is that I just think it's just an interesting perspective on how careers and you know, everybody's in a career listening to this can sometimes take over your personality. And you can just get carried away on a certain route and end up deeply unhappy. And if I had someone telling me a story like that before, it happened to me, I might have seen it happening. But when you're involved in it day to day, you don't you know, but I've thoroughly enjoy what I do. Now. I love working for myself, and I love working with LinkedIn. So that rather difficult time my life turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to me. AJ Wilcox 6:30 Well, I definitely feel you there. I've been through a divorce. I've, I've been fired. I've started a company, all of those things I definitely feel for you. And I look back definitely with the same respect and understanding. Of course, going through hard things is not easy for us. But I wouldn't trade any of it. It made me who I am. And I'm really grateful for it. Mark Williams 6:50 Yeah, so I was listening to podcast recently with Bear Grylls. And he said that in life, we don't always do the things that are tough to do, because we want to protect ourselves from those tough things, difficult things, awkward things. And also, sometimes things happen to us that are unpleasant. But almost always, they turn out to be highly rewarding when we look back at them. So don't always take the easy route is kind of what he was saying. And I think there's a lot of truth in that as well. AJ Wilcox 7:19 Yeah, Bear is wise. You may drink his own urine, but he's wise. Mark Williams 7:26 Yeah. Apart from in that sense. AJ Wilcox 7:29 I mean, first of all, tell us because I personally probably know 50 Organic LinkedIn experts. It's kind of a cottage industry of trainers, how would you say your specialty is differentiated? How does it differ from others in the industry? Mark Williams 7:42 My expertise has changed over the time that I've been doing this, because you can imagine I mean, when I first started LinkedIn training, content wasn't really a thing to me. I mean, there was content on LinkedIn. But it was so bad. Nobody was ever thinking about it. It was really just a load of job ads basically filled everybody's feeds, you know. And so in those days, I was training completely different stuff and talking to people about completed and stuff about LinkedIn. And then of course, the platform really changed, I'd like to say it was about five years ago, was probably nearer to 10 days ago. Now think about it. Time flies, but it did start to really change. And so you adapt with that. And I think actually the stage that we're at now, I enjoy this, more than I've ever done with any part of LinkedIn. And sometimes clients contact me and say, Can you do a workshop on searching or, you know, they always want to cover profiles, which I'm always happy to cover, but a bit boring, frankly. That's kind of old school stuff. The really interesting stuff is all around content. I guess I'm I wouldn't say I'm the only person that does this by any sense of the imagination. But what I like to talk about and work with people on is about getting out there on LinkedIn, and becoming more influential, more visible and more influential. Visibility comes first, but it has to be allied to credibility. Visibility and Credibility when added together gives you influence and its influence that allows you the opportunity to leverage that influence for your own success and your business's success. No matter whether you work for someone else, or you work for yourself, that ability to have influence and leverage it. That's what I specialize in. That's where I've worked with people who are good at what they do. And well known in small circles, traditional offline circles, and communities, and unsure about LinkedIn for a whole host of reasons, sometimes silly reasons, sometimes very profound reasons. And work with those people to help them utilize this tool to allow them to show the world actually how good they really are, what they do. And of course, and we'll get into the some shows we talk more. But of course the way to do that is not to tell the world how good you are at what you do. It's to show the world, how good you are at what you do, and that you're someone that you want to do business with. And so that aspect that I specialize in that kind of visibility. See how we use this platform to become a personality, a character that people want to do business with respect, but also like and want to do business with? AJ Wilcox 10:11 Very well said. So I guess my biggest question then because you specialize in this, why be a creator on LinkedIn? Why create content? WhyPost? Mark Williams 10:20 What is the best way? Nothing beats it yet who knows in the future, but nothing beats it. Yeah, of developing your brand's now, whether that be your personal brand, or your company brand or probably both. And making that more visible to a wider audience. Obviously, everything that you do on LinkedIn has the opportunity of doing it at scale, as opposed to other methods that are on LinkedIn or online. And so it's the best way, if you can post successfully, if you can consistently show up in people's feeds, then they are going to learn more about you. I mean that in the broadest possible sense. So learn more as in who you are, right? So first of all, who is this guy? All right, okay, understand who he is, or who she is. And then educate those people in what you do, how you do it, why you do it, and who you are as a person. And all those elements are what makes someone want to do business with you, you know, it's not an overnight thing. But if you can post successfully, or produce content for LinkedIn, that is seen by a wide range of people, then you have an opportunity to generate business from LinkedIn, without having to push hard doesn't mean you work hard, you do have to work hard. But there's a big difference between pushing hard and working hard. And you know, I'm always away from and against the kind of philosophy of knocking on doors, and pushing hard to win people's business, it makes you feel good. Because you feel like you're doing something. You feel like you're acting something positive in order to grow your business. But everybody else is kind of pushing away from you, because people don't want to be sold to in that way. And so what you're trying to do, through being highly visible through a successful content has become magnetic so that people want to come to you. And you know, the analogy is that you are standing still, and people are queuing up at your shop, as opposed to you having to get out there with a trolley and walk around people's houses, knock on their doors and say, hey, you know, I've got something to offer you. successfully getting a line of people outside your virtual store, irrespective of what you sell physical products or otherwise, is the name of the game. And the way to achieve that is through successful content. AJ Wilcox 12:42 I totally agree with that. In one of your most recent podcast episodes, you talked about kind of a case study where someone posted the same thing, the same video on LinkedIn, as well as on Tik Tok, they were talking about how much more viral how much more attention they got on Tik Tok. And as I was listening to that, I was like, well, that's, that's great. virality is very, very interesting for a lot of reasons. But I look at LinkedIn as a network and go, where would I rather be viral? Where would I rather be seen? Is it the network where people are paying attention to who I am professionally? Or is it a network that's really hard to build a brand? And you're just you're being seen by people who don't already know who you are? And a lot of them might be kids? Mark Williams 13:25 Yeah, TikTok is an interesting platform. I think what the point that guy was making is how the algorithm on TikTok is managing to distribute his content has so many more people, and that LinkedIn was much more restrictive, in whose content was getting in front of who's still getting decent numbers from LinkedIn to be fair, but not on the scale that he was achieving with tick tock, and it's not the size of the audience, per se. It's more the effectiveness of the algorithm to push something out. And I don't know what the answer to that is exactly. But I do think he was making a valid point about the fact that we could achieve more, should the LinkedIn algorithm work in a more effective way. Now, I'm not saying that TikTok has got all the answers here at all. But I do think that LinkedIn could and, by the way, are learning from TikTok. I think, the very early days of LinkedIn, they looked to Facebook a lot. You know, they copied a lot of things from Facebook, and they were clearly Facebook admirers, and that died off many years ago. For most of us, but definitely LinkedIn. And since then, they haven't really shown any evidence of sort of copying or following anyone else. Until TikTok, actually, and they do seem quite influenced by TikTok. So you may have a point about the algorithm. It may be that the algorithm with LinkedIn will improve to give us better reach but without a doubt, you know, the audience is the right place on LinkedIn. And there are frustrations with lots of things to do with LinkedIn and you know, anybody listening to my podcast will know that I can be very critical of LinkedIn at times because always coming from a place of love, you know, I love the platform, I love the community. I like the company, you know. And so it's a disappointment thing rather than that I'm angry with them as I want it to be better. And I want them to get better and all coming from a good place. And so you know, I can be critical of LinkedIn, for sure. But at the end of the day, we have a hugely valuable platform. And it's important that there are things in place to protect members of this platform that are using it for the reasons in which its purposes, right, which is business networking. Now, I'm not old school at all, despite the fact that we're doing this long time. I'm really not old school with regards to LinkedIn. I love all kinds of content. And I think LinkedIn is a place for all kinds of content. But I do also understand that essentially, what sets LinkedIn aside from other social networks is it is a business network. And if it became TikTok, then it would lose its value, right? It would just be called other TikTok. TikTok don't want to be LinkedIn, so why should LinkedIn want to be TikTok, right? So it has to keep its identity, but at the same time, learn things from other platforms that, you know, have tracked certain things and done things better. And, you know, a frustration of mine is I just wish LinkedIn could be more innovative along those lines. They seem to follow other people more than they do innovate and come up with ideas themselves. I think they are getting a bit better at that. But that's certainly been a long standing frustration for me with LinkedIn. AJ Wilcox 16:29 Oh, same here. All right, so we've talked about virality, about viral reach, I'll take a little bit of a step back here and say, Why is LinkedIn a platform where you can get that viral reach? What is making your content able to be seen by people who are not your direct followers and first level connections? Mark Williams 16:47 So this cuts to good content should be all about the mechanism of distribution on LinkedIn. And there's different types of distribution. But if we talk about post distribution, the mechanism of post distribution is through engagement primarily actually comments, but reactions, and repost are also effective in terms of not reshares. But reposts, which is a slightly new thing. There are also effective means of distribution. Of course, on LinkedIn, we have these two sides, we have company pages and personal profiles. Company pages is where all the your stuff happens, all the advertising stuff happens. And so there's not so much a conflict in the sense that LinkedIn will not restrict personal content or don't restrict personal content, organic reach in the same way that they would do with company posts, organic reach. Company posts, organic reach, if they allow that the same level of reach and distribution as personal posts, then nobody buy ads right? Why would you? But with personal posts, they still allow great organic reach. And also, you know, another factor that plays into all of this is that LinkedIn, have traditionally in their DNA, is there a subscription based monetization model. Now, advertising has become significantly more important to them, and continues to be and will continue to become bigger and bigger. But all those people that predicted many years ago, the likes of Gary Vaynerchuk, who said, you know, get on LinkedIn now, because organic reach will disappear like it has done with everyone else. Well, that was at least five years ago. I don't get it, it's actually better now than it was then. So clearly, there's something different. And I think one of the things that's different is that LinkedIn still make the majority of their revenue from subscriptions. And there is no other social network that does that. So they are distinctly separate in that regard, and can afford to play this game of allowing people great organic reach. The mechanism of distribution for organic reach is putting out content that people are going to want to engage with, that then brings it to their followers, or their network, their connections. And that is the key elements to understanding what good content is really, is that if you can put out content that essentially starts a conversation, then you're definitely in a position where you have the opportunity of not necessarily virality. Virality is an unrealistic objective. That's like saying, you know, I want to be a footballer who plays in the Champions League final every year, you know, it's not realistic for most people, but trying to get greater and greater reach is important. You can't get away from that. I mean, there's always this debate about No, I don't care if it's only seen by 10 people so long as they're the right 10 people. But the problem with that is tha the whole point of this is that we're trying to reach an audience that don't know us. But we are trying to reach an audience that knows this as well. And that's a different thing. You want to be a reminder to those people and keep in touch with those people and through content as well as direct message in another mean but we also want the opportunity to reach people that haven't heard about us. And to do that you do need reach. You do need to get beyond those people that are already connected with you. And the way to do that is to get people to comment, ideally, engage with your posts. AJ Wilcox 20:18 So what kinds of posts and content do well, on LinkedIn? Mark Williams 20:22 Well, I have five types that I usually talk about in my sessions with people. And this information is based on observing this for years and years, on my podcast, I have a feature called post of the week, which is really popularized, it's become a problem, I actually have to admit, because I find it really stressful. Each week, choosing posts of the week now. It used to be back in the day, that half of them would come from me, right, because nobody was nominated. And he posts and so I'd go looking for a good post, and then just, you know, put it in as opposed to the week. Now I get so many nominations, and also so many good nominations, it's really hard to pick the winner. The beauty about that feature for me is you really keep an eye on the stuff that does really well, right. And that has been seen by a wide audience, and then you can start to analyze, the reason proposed to the week isn't just to, you know, give praise to people have done a good job, it's actually for us all to look at it and go, What can we learn from this, you know, and that's what I do with that feature every week. And that's allowed me to get a feel. So I have these five things that are broadly categories of posts that tend to do well. So the first one is, I call it challenging and debatable. So putting out something that kind of polarized his opinion in some ways. So it doesn't have to be, you have to be careful with this one, obviously. But you could put something out, there's going to upset a lot of people, and you perhaps don't want to do that. But at the same time, it allows you to demonstrate elements of your character and personality that people will really buy into or not. And I always think that's quite a good thing. I mean, you don't want to go around, you know, obsessing people for the sake of it and just being controversial for the sake of it, that doesn't reflect well on you. But being authentic, and actually putting something out, that kind of, you know, put your flag in the ground on on a point is a good thing. Because those people that agree with it are the people that are more likely to do business with you. So it's no bad thing that your crowd your audience, your people that like you are gonna respond well to that. But it's also a good thing in a post if people disagree with it, right. So quite often post that do the best you see the common thread as it created a lot of debate and opinions on either side. It's what we call something that's not vanilla. That's very much what we call a marmite post. I know you don't have marmite in the States. But it's a spread that you either love or you hate, right? I'm a fan, right? So I'm very much on the side of loving marmite, but a lot of people absolutely detest it. There's nothing in the middle. You can't have a vanilla opinion on marmite. So something like that. That's that's the first type challenging, debatable gets people talking. A second type, these aren't in any particular order, by the way, equally as powerful is helpful. So you're putting out content that is really helpful to the majority of your target audience. What I mean by that is that the kind of people that you want to reach are going to receive something in their feeds, that actually, when they consume it, they actually feel that it's helped them in some way. Now, you have to be careful with this one because if they believe that even though it may have been helpful to them, that you are using it as a way of persuading them to do business with you, then that might destroy its effectiveness. If it could be perceived before being properly consumed as being promotional. That's a problem. So I always say to people, the best way to do this actually, is to really know your audience, like really know these people well. You can't know them all I know, but get an intimate understanding of the things that they find challenging and difficult. And when you understand that, then try and find solutions to those problems, and then post about those solutions, which are helpful to them. Now, you may have found those solutions on LinkedIn or anywhere you want doesn't really matter. Always obviously, quote where you found that solution from and make sure everyone's tagged that should be tagged, so they get full credit for it. But your job is to make people's working environment easier and easier. And if you're putting out content that they find helpful to them, then those type of posts typically do very well. Third type is sort of a type and sort of not because this kind of permeates all of the types really. But the third one I would stay is personal posts. Now. I don't mean necessarily, intimately personal. excuse the pun, that's a personal decision. But so that's up to you. Yeah, how personal you want to get with it is entirely up to you. I'm not not that. I'm not talking about the fact that you talk about your divorce on a, on a post, or I talk about my dad having dementia on a post, I'm not necessarily talking about that. I'm talking about whatever subject you are approaching, you take a personal perspective to it, you bring your personality to it, your opinions to it, your sense of what's right and wrong about it, or your confusion with it, or something that allows people to feel that you're not A. preaching at them, and B. that you're just sharing something in a very real human way. And when people see content like that, they relate to it, and they respond well to it. And, you know, look, this is not something that I would have said, six, seven years ago, but you can't deny it. I mean, just you look at LinkedIn every day. And the posts that do well, are those posts that are in some way personal. And they always say, it's difficult to show this as a visual thing. But imagine two circles that overlap. It's a classic kind of diagram of two circles that overlap. And the circle on the right is business content. And the circle on the left is personal content. And when I say to people is not so we have business content on LinkedIn, we have personal content on LinkedIn, let me tell you now, the vast majority of content on LinkedIn is the business circle, right? The vast majority of people that post on LinkedIn are posting business content. Now you find that hard to believe, because you think it's personal. But here's the deal. That's the content you seeing. There's a difference between the two. But the vast majority is business, the vast majority that you see is personal. What is that telling you? AJ Wilcox 26:44 Good point. Mark Williams 26:44 Yeah, that's the reality of what we're dealing with here. Now, the reason why those circles crossover is that's the sweet spot, right? So if you're approaching a business subject in a personal way, then you're hitting the sweet spot. So that's good advice, I think over finding how to be personal in your content on LinkedIn. So that's the third time personal. Fourth is, I call this something cool. And what I mean by that is something innovative, new, different, exciting, don't care, what it is really doesn't matter, right? Doesn't have to be related to what you do probably better is not related to what you do. But something that you found or something shown to you something that's excited you and you've gone Wow. Right? You know, someone shows you a feature on the iPhone, and you didn't know about it, and you go, Oh, right, I didn't know about that is amazing, I could do that. I think if you've seen that thing, TikTok is great for this actually TikTok, we can learn a lot from TikTok. People post off and you go out now you could do that, right. And there's a thing that I've seen during the rounds, where when someone plugs in a charge as their phone, it speaks to them, and they can say what they wanted to say. So they get it saying all kinds of rude things, right? So they unplug their phone thinking it's someone else's phone. Anyway, what I'm saying is that when something like that happens, if the effect to you was excited you and you thought wow, that was amazing, then share it and talk about it, because other people will as well. People will love something innovative Do you different. Mark Williams 28:09 And then the final type is, which is a really obvious one, but highly topical. And sometimes you can use highly topical content or subject matter to express something or talk about something that you want to talk about. And the example I always give for this is years ago, there was a band that I'm sure you know, AJ, because you're younger than me, called One Direction, right? Hugely successful, won The X Factor, etc, One Direction were going an absolute storm and taking over the world. And then one of the members left, Zane left. And it was big, big news, like all over the papers and everything big news. And this guy who was a coach and HR consultant, and he did a post with a picture of Zane, just a picture of Zane on LinkedIn. Anything can work. And then what he talked about was how do you manage a situation when a key member of your team leaves unexpectedly? Brilliant, right? Just because he got people's attention with a topical subject. But related, it's something that he knew what matters to them, because he's audience of people that manage people, right. So that was a great post. And I think that's the kind of stuff that I'm talking about when I talk about highly topical, not just for the sake of it, but because you can relate it to something and it's interesting. So they're the sort of five types that typically do well. AJ Wilcox 29:32 Well, what about formats then for posts? If you have those five kinds of posts, the topics, the aim of them? Are you going to try to shoehorn those into a specific post, for instance, if you've heard that text only does really, really well. Do you go all in on that, like how do you think about the format? Mark Williams 29:48 Yeah, I mean, people overestimate the power of formats, nothing like as important as the content itself. So getting the subject right is far far more important. And I find people get really obsessed with you know, I'm into video or I'm into text posts. Just like honestly, don't worry about that. Worry about getting your content, right. But that said, when you've decided what it is you want to talk about some things will suit one format better than another. So for instance, let's take that example I just gave you, that probably was more suitable for an image post, right? Because the picture of Zane would stand out, people would notice it and go, what's this about? Right? So that kind of makes sense. But honestly, if I looked at the numbers and said, Well, what you know, which posts typically when posted the week or post of the year, which is the most successful one of the year, out of all the posts of the week, it's normally an image posts, but they don't consistently do well image posts, because a lot of people post image posts that are just awful and don't do very well at all. But if you get it right, with an image post, they are phenomenally good. They stop the scroll, people notice them, the next bit has to work, though, you still got to be a good hook, you've got to get people to read it, click on the See More, and then action it so they can work. But they can suffer from poor dwell time. So meaning someone sees it quickly goes, Oh, that's nice move on, or quick like and move on. And therefore they don't do as well. So on average, they don't do great, but they tend to be the most successful of all. Text only a fantastic for comments. Because you're not distracted, you know, you've just got the text. And so you read it, you take it on board, you understand it. And if it's sufficiently well written and formatted, then you're more likely to comment. Whereas all other types of content, video document posts and image posts, you can be distracted by the content, so much so that you don't comment, you see you like it, you move on type of thing doesn't engross you as much as the text only posts, they've all got their advantages. Video is best for personal branding, because you're talking to your audience, you're within the scene, the whites of your eyes, all the things that you know are important for personal branding, work really well with video. And document posts are great for views because people have to click on them to move to the next page. And every click is telling the algorithm Hey, I'm actually looking at this post, you know, is appear on my feed, I'm actually actually paying attention to it. So they're all good in different ways. I'm never a fan of getting obsessed with one type of format, you know, all posts work, provided the contents good and suitable for that type of format. AJ Wilcox 32:12 Ah, beautiful. So what pitfalls have you seen? Obviously, we've talked a little bit about if you're too business, it's not going to be seen. What are some of the pitfalls as people are coming to you saying I want to start creating content on LinkedIn, and they go and do it. And then they come back and say, it didn't work? What are they doing? Mark Williams 32:29 Yes, well, don't say too much business. Also too much promotional or too much self serving. Self serving, promotional is perfectly fine. I wouldn't avoid it totally. But he context needs to be that you've built an audience, and that they're invested in you. I've seen people post about winning an award and got fantastic amount of comments, because their audience genuinely pleased for them. But they're genuinely pleased because they got to that position by working really hard at building a relationship with that audience. So it's not a no, no, you just need to make sure you concentrate on content that is, you know, focused on your audience rather than you. So that's an interesting one to discuss with you. I always think a marketing mindset is not helpful. Until the mindset here. When you producing content, if you're thinking about kind of marketing sense, it's not helpful. But if you think about content in an engaging and networking sense, then you tend to do better. So sort of mindset needs to be I'm looking to talk to people here, start a conversation, not marketing, I think people tend to post content that they would want to see, or that they want people to see, as opposed to what people want to see. And that seems like such an obvious thing to say. But quite often, particularly when I'm working with clients, one on one, and we talk about what kind of things they want to post. Typically, they come out with something and I go, so what's interesting about that, and they tell me lots of things, and they go back to me not to I was asking you what's interesting to you. What is interesting to me? What touch points does that have that's going to generate some interest in me? So I think people will naturally tend to gravitate to things that they are interested in themselves, or they want to say. This is a point I want to mak. Well, that might work but you need to think about your audience. And then the final one thing that I do come across a lot is people especially when they first start out, they just start posting by all right, I'm just going to post. That's it, I'm posting. But actually, that's like going to a networking event in person, you know, and there's all these people talk in this room and you walking in and going, can I just stop everyone? I've got something to say. Right? And this is what I'm gonna say and then walking out again. And it's people are looking at you and go, What happened? Who is that? I don't even want to know who that was, frankly, because that's not human interaction. So you've got to get out there and start commenting on other people's content before you can even think about posting yourself. And the ratio of comments to posts should be at least five times the amount of comments than posts, at least I mean, some people saying it's 10 times these days, but it's at least five times in my view. So they're the typical kind, there's lots of things people get wrong, and you can pick out things and change things specifically. But broadly, the kind of common things are those I would say. AJ Wilcox 35:31 Beautiful. What tipsand tricks can you share, as we're thinking about creating posts to go viral? To get better reach? What are some of those things we should be trying to do? Mark Williams 35:42 Yeah, some practical things, things that we haven't mentioned already will be things like when you post, it's not as critical as it used to be. But it's still important to think about when you're posting. I always think you want to give a post a bit of airtime. So better to post in the morning. Again, it depends where your audience is in the third same time zone or not. But bearing in mind where your audience is you want it to land in their feed in the morning, ideally, and give it time so that people have a chance to comment on it, and then it distributes from there. I tend to avoid Fridays and Saturdays as a result of that. I personally don't post on a Sunday, but I know people that do and particular Sunday afternoon stroke evening actually can be more successful than you think, believe it or not. But just think about the timing and, you know, learn from what happens to you. Because, you know, no one solution is right for everyone. But broadly speaking, I think Monday to Thursday in the morning is a good time to post when you're writing particularly a text only posts but other posts as well really concentrate on your hook. Right? The first part is critical. They got to see it, it's got to grab them, they've got to want to click on See more, they got to want to read the rest. So if you get nothing else, right, get those first few lines absolutely spot on. That's really important. A little bit of what I said before, but image posts and document posts, you need clicks on them, it's quite important that someone interacts with your post physically. So don't just read it, they do something with it. Now that could happen with video, but it's less likely to with a video and it's harder to achieve. That video has strengths in other areas, as I said before, but if you want more views, and more interaction on an image or a document posts, there needs to be a reason to click so bear that in mind, you'll have to interact with your posts and actually click on it. Videos, keep it short mistake people make videos is that they let them go on too long. But if you keep the videos nice and short and snappy, I used to say maximum three minutes, it seems ridiculous to say that now that's like, that's an age three minutes. So I would say less than a minute now possibly even less, definitely the whole world is getting shorter and shorter. In terms of attention span. So bear that in mind. I said before relatable content, you know, can people relate to it, that's critical. And also something I've already mentioned. But just to reiterate, really is personality and personal posts reveal more about you. Don't be anonymous, don't be a brand, be a personal brand, be a real person that people can understand and learn to like, and trust. And, you know, that means you have to give a bit of yourself. But that's normal human interaction. If you want to develop a relationship with someone in person or online, you can't leave the conversation at a very basic level, you have to at some point start opening up. And when you open up, then they open up. And then that's how you develop warmth. And it's exactly the same content on LinkedIn. So don't necessarily do that to start with. But be prepared to open up and show a bit of who you are. And your character that's important I think for content. AJ Wilcox 38:47 Well, that's sure a lot easier to do personally. What about sharing from company pages, you can tell us about my experience is company page content doesn't engage the same way, it doesn't get the same reach and virality as personal posts. But we also know that while we're advertising, the company page is the whole base of all of our advertising. And so a lot of our clients, a lot of our listeners are going to be thinking about okay, what can we post from the company? And you know, what fits in well, so that we get some additional reach from the company? Mark Williams 39:20 Yeah, I mean, the bottom line is that if you have an expectation of getting great reach from a company page post that isn't sponsored, you're not going to get there, right? So it's an unrealistic objective. Don't get me wrong, I've seen posts that do well, but they are so rare, and it's just doesn't happen. So it's the wrong objective to have. That doesn't mean that you can't make your company page content better. It's just that you won't necessarily see a huge dramatic difference, right? Because they're never going to give you fantastic reach. Without a doubt. It's the same kind of stuff really. But what you do is use the personality of your employees. So you maybe feature people, talk about people, what are their backgrounds? But I had a client once who actually did this for a short while and it worked quite well for them. And you know We're Humans of New York. Yes, yeah. If you think about what they do, and how they describe people, they show people and tell their stories. Every company has external employees, and each of them have got a story. Now, if you wanted to put out great company based content, why not tell the stories of the people that work for your business? I think that'd be such a powerful technique to use very few people, either brave enough as employees or as a company to want to do that. But that's the kind of content that would do well on LinkedIn, because people love that. As I said before, people are interesting in people. It's a people to people network. That's the kind of content that could do well, if people are brave enough to do it. AJ Wilcox 40:40 Great idea that makes me want to start doing that for ourselves. I'm gonna definitely let my content guy know. Do you know if any companies out there who are doing particularly well on their posts? Which company pages do you look to and say, Oh, they're actually doing pretty Mark Williams 40:52 Well, not that many. I'm trying to think now. A bit of a false answer in a way, there's an ads one. You probably know this. They post ads, they've seen that done really well. It's like a, you know, this is great advertising. And that does well. Very visual posts, followed by obviously lots of marketing people that are interested in ads that do well. I don't know if it's a true example really, because it's a relatively unique situation, I think. I always remember, they were a quite good one. And LinkedIn brings out a list every year of company pages that they think are particularly good. And I look at the numbers, you just think, well, they're not doing that well, really. So I'm not quite sure why you think they're so good. It's quite hard finding good company pages, but you do come across them occasionally. Honestly, right, the moments on my head, I can't think of one that I could give you, that would be a great answer to that. AJ Wilcox 41:45 One that really caught my attention several years back is a company called Cheddar, they might be called Cheddar News, I'm looking at their company page, right? A lot of what they do on all their channels, this isn't just a LinkedIn specific thing. But a lot of their videos show some new innovative product at some invention. It's something cool, that's going to change the world. Mark Williams 42:06 Now remember them now you've said it, I remember them. Yeah. Which is that something cool posts. No, absolutely right. AJ Wilcox 42:11 And they've done a very good job of that. Because they're a news network and that's what they concentrate on. I think that's really repeatable for them. For me to go out and find something innovative and changing the world in the ads world, not quite so easy, but it's a good example. AJ Wilcox 42:27 What are some of the keys to having a great presence on LinkedIn, if someone is just getting started, and they say, I want to knock this out of the park, what's the advice you're giving them? Mark Williams 42:38 Well, you're not going to knock it out of the park to start with, that would be my first set realistic expectations, it's unlikely to happen. You've got to slowly build your presence. But you'll get there a lot quicker, if you're open and authentic about what you do. So don't play to the audience in the sense of this is what they want me to be like, be yourself, but talk about things that they would find interesting. Don't mistake those two things, right. There's content that they would find interesting that is for them, but delivered by you as who you are, right. And when you combine those two things, that's a very powerful thing that gets you to where you want to be quicker. You wouldn't expect that to happen overnight, it takes time. So we've talked before about commenting, genuinely, you must comment far more than you post and spend time thinking about your comments. And look for opportunities, don't just go, the classic thing people do on LinkedIn is they open up their homepage feed, there's nothing there. What am I supposed to do? It's like, well, there is a lot there, actually. But it's not on your page. Okay? Now you can improve your page in two ways. One, you can start unfollowing people that put rubbish on your page. But more powerful than that is you can start finding good content, commenting on it, following those people, and then you will find that your feed will start to improve because the messages that you're getting is what I want to see, right. But more than that, what you're doing by doing that is you're starting to build your visibility through your commenting, right. Everyone else that comments on that post will notice your comments. And if you spend time thinking about what you can say not things like congrats or great post or rubbish, like they're just kind of written likes, really they have little value, but something that adds value in some way. And also maybe shows a bit about you does two things. One, it raises your profile amongst the audience of people that are already engaging with that post and obviously the person that posted it, but also those people that are connected to you that will see that post in their feed and your comment that's all they see. You know, if you think about your homepage feed, a post appears there from a second or a third tier connection. You think how did that appear? And then it says well because AJ commented on it and then all you see underneath it is AJ is comment. It is 200 comments, but I only see yours. But because I'm following you, not following you connected to you and because of that, I see your comments, then I'm starting to learn more about you. And again, when we talk about building a relationship, there's visibility is one thing and reaching a new audience. But there's also building a relationship with your existing audience. And commenting achieves that. And that's why that is so important for you to do that. So authenticity of said, adding value, think about adding value to your audience every day, you know, my job is to add value to my audience, my job on LinkedIn is not to get them to buy something from me, it's the me to add value to them, them to see me as a valuable connection as a valuable person on LinkedIn that they want to see that they want to interact with. They want to develop a relationship, as a result, they'll be queuing up to want to do business with you. But if you're too brutal about it, and you only think in terms of I want to win customers, I want to win business, then it's really pushing water uphill, and so you won't succeed, but that you will eventually get somewhere. But it's slow and hard and difficult, much better to spend your time building. I was talking to someone about this the other day when we've been very specific about their content. And I said, the problem with your comments is that and your posts as well, actually, is that you're just not showing empathy. You've got to be helpful and empathetic, you know, always looking to add value, we need to do something that helps people along the way, as a good networker. And you know, if we go from these days, back in the day, when people were offline networking, there were people that were absolutely phenomenal at it, and they were always more interested in you. They're always trying to help you, you know, that's very obvious face to face, and very obvious to do face to face, I think not always easy to do, but something that you can do. Online, people hesitate from doing that. And I think if you can do it, it makes a big difference. So there are things, you have to say the comment thing, but commenting with purpose. All of that really, really helps. AJ Wilcox 46:57 Perfect. Well, thanks so much for sharing. I feel like there's been a ton of value here. I hope we have you back at some point as well. Obviously, this is a very ads focused podcast. But I get asked about the organic side all the time, I thought I would bring in my top information source. Who and what are your top information sources? Obviously they're all going to come and follow you? Who do you pay attention to to learn more about extended reach and content on LinkedIn? Mark Williams 47:23 Oh, wow. I mean, less so much subject matter experts. Quite like the word that Richard Vanderblonde is doing with his research. It's funny research, because I toyed with doing it myself in the past. It's a lot of work, a lot of work. And I really admire the fact that he goes to the effort to do it. But the reality of it is, and this is no knock on Richard at all, because it's really valuable that someone's doing that. But the truth is that if you know this platform, well, there's no surprises. I could have written that research just by making it up. To me, it's just so it's one of those things, I think he adds massive value into my feed because he's pulling it from that kind of smart, slightly more scientific perspective, which I think is really good. I love Andy Forte, because I find him entertaining and challenging as well. He has a natural, kind of Scottish, challenging aspect to him, you know, intelligently challenges you on things. I like that aspect. I mean, he's a lovely guy that makes it sound a bit like he's not he's a lovely guy. But he also has that slightly quirky kind of challenging way about him. And I really admire that. But outside of kind of LinkedIn people are Bryn Tillman is another one. I would always say on the sales side, I just love her. Like the things that I go, Oh, you could never do that. And then she puts it in a way that makes you think, oh, yeah, could Yeah, you just incredibly infectious. And I love her energy and just such a positive person. But outside of those sort of people do I learn the most from just ordinary people on LinkedIn, who are just doing great content. And I wouldn't know where to start with that. There's so many people that I follow on LinkedIn. And sometimes it's not always that they're doing great content. Sometimes they're doing stuff, they do some good content, and they do something that really fails and I go all right, what can we learn from that? You know, that just absolutely bombed and I don't have the emotional attachment to like they do. But and I can look at it objectively and go right? Well, probably this and probably so, you know, studying and observing what happens in my feed and searching for content that's doing well and posts of the week and all that kind of stuff is the greatest teacher to me. You know, that's the greatest way of learning I find. Nobody has all the answers right? Of course they don't. That's obvious, but I think we're in a world where people like to attach themselves to gurus you know, I follow this person because... You know why it's not as simple as that, you know, everyone's got value to add, lots of people do things in different ways and try things in different ways. And, and so I learned for a wide variety of people on LinkedIn, and I'm a keen observer of what's going on. AJ Wilcox 50:05 I absolutely love that. Thanks so much for sharing. All right, so jumping into a different topic here, right before we close, what are you most excited about right now, either personally or professionally? Just what your mind is playing with what you're chasing what you're excited about. Mark Williams 50:17 I'm most excited about Liverpool in the Premier League next year. That's probably the number one. Number two is I'm very excited to see how well Darwin Nunez does. Who's our new striker that we've signed. You weren't expecting this for your age, but you probably were actually. I'm starting with a personal stuff. I'm very excited to be seeing Coldplay at Wembley this year. I've seen them three times in the past, and they said they would never tour again. And I was absolutely gutted. I mean, some people just don't like him. But honestly, anybody that has any slight kind of Oh, yeah, they're okay. Go to a concert. They're just amazing experience. And so yeah, we're going on the my fiance's birthday in August, believe it or not. We both loved Coldplay, but we met after they stopped touring. And I thought we'd never get the chance to do it togethet. It's one of those things that just be such a wonderful shared experience. Anyway, so I'm very excited for that. And the final personal one is we are planning a trip to Vietnam next year. And I'm very excited about that as well. It's out of our comfort zone for us, we tend to do slightly more comfortable things in that normally. But we kind of take the view that we're not getting any younger, and it's the right time to do it now. So yeah, we're quite excited about that, we're at the planning stage of that. Yeah. But moving on to more business related stuff. You know, from our LinkedIn point of view, it's always an exciting platform, you know, the thing I've learned over the years is you never know what's around the corner, there's always something exciting happening on LinkedIn, very rare, you get into those stagnant periods where very little happens, it does sometimes happen, but very rare. But the bigger picture with what's going on with LinkedIn is creator mode and what they're doing with creator mode, and, you know, they come across this idea, they are going to be more successful if they encourage people to create better content and smart move. And what they're doing with it is interesting, but I don't think we have seen anything of it yet. I think it's so much in its infancy. And it's going to develop and develop and develop. And I think it's hugely exciting for people what they're going to be doing there. And they won't get everything right. And there'll be lots of hiccups along the way. But just the fact itself that they now see. And it's taken a long time to open their eyes to this, but they now see that the platform will succeed because of what we do not what they do that they should support us. For years and years, they always wanted to dictate our behavior. And they still do a bit but I'm now seeing a change in mindset. That is more about how can we encourage them to get better at what they want to do. And I think that's a very positive move. And I'm very excited to see how that develops in the future. AJ Wilcox 53:04 Oh, so cool. I'm not big on soccer for us, football for you. But I am curious to hear your reaction on the show. Ted Lasso. Have you watched Ted Lasso at all? Yeah. Mark Williams 53:14 Oh, yes. I've seen Ted Lasso. Oh, yeah. Not the recent series. But the first two things series. Yeah, I've seen. AJ Wilcox 53:19 What is that, like, from your perspective of someone who lives in the UK? Have they nailed it? Is it still funny? Or is it too close to home? Mark Williams 53:27 Oh, it's funny, very much. So now, it's very amusing. And what I like about it is that it takes this kind of aspect of which I think is an important lesson for us all to learn is that we can all get very carried away with our if you know, you've got to know this. You got to know what you're doing. You got to be born and you got to done this for years. You know, I could easily turn around to a lot of people in LinkedIn and go yeah, I've been doing this for 14 years, don't tell me I can I learn anything from you. But I don't think that way. And that's the Ted Lasso kind of lesson in that Ted Lasso knew nothing about football, but understood people, right. And I think, you know, people were very skeptical. He was obviously taken on as a joke. Anyway, people were very skeptical about whether he could be successful, but he was because he understood people. And funnily enough, there is a real Ted Lasso, so you know. The manager of Leeds United is a guy from the US now he obviously does know football, he's managed lots of clubs before. He's character is that he's quite a big sort of character and quite enthusiastic and gets really into it. And I was looking at him and think I just can't get away from these just like Ted Lassos. But I think that's the appearance I mean, as a character, and again, with any program, it's all about the characters. The character is a really good character, isn't it? So when you can really buy into as a character, I just love that aspect of going. Yes, this is a very traditional sport. It's, you know, the biggest sport in the world. It's like, and these people that play it think that nobody could teach them anything. And that's fine. But I'll just be Ted Lasso and I'll just do my thing and we'll see. And it works good. Oh, and I love that. AJ Wilcox 55:07 Same here. It's a touching show. I know this isn't a media podcast, but pretty awesome. Alright, so for those of us who want to follow you want to hear more from you? How would you tell us to do that? How do we follow you? Tell us about your podcast, all that? Yeah, sure. Mark Williams 55:21 I mean, the two main places that LinkedIn and my podcast really, I don't read much social media outside of that, really. So on LinkedIn, easy to find, should be surprised there's plenty of Mark Williams is on there. But if you search for Mark Williams or Mr. LinkedIn, you should find me fairly easily. My URL is linkedin.com//Mr. LinkedIn, but the podcasts which were now in the 364th episode. The next one will be, which is this week is the main way that people follow me and is my biggest audience. But it's my most engaged audience have a say. And that's called LinkedInformed, which you can find everywhere. That is the most enjoyable thing I do every week. I absolutely love my podcast and do it because I feel it's important to do. It feels important to do is probably the best way to put it. And I do it because I enjoy it. And I feel like, like I'm chatting with friends every week. It's not like other podcasts. It's not an interview show, do occasionally interview people, you've been kind enough to come on, but not often. And only when I think it's someone that can really add something extra and add value to the audience. But mostly, it's just me chatting about LinkedIn each week with friends. And that's the way I would always want it to be. AJ Wilcox 55:42 Well, I have not missed an episode of all of them. All the 360. Mark Williams 56:44 Really? AJ Wilcox 56:45 Yeah, absolutely. When we met, I think you were 100 and something in I went back and binge every one that I could get really some of the early ones like I couldn't get to for whatever reason, but I'm a huge fan. I would encourage everyone here listening, make sure you go and listen to the LinkedInformed Podcast. It is sincere like one of the best podcasts. I'm subscribed to probably 25 different shows. And this is one of the three that I get really excited about every time I see it. There's a new episode. Mark Williams 57:11 Well, fantastic. Thank you for that. That's lovely of you to say that. AJ Wilcox 57:15 Absolutely. All right, everyone, go follow Mark. Mark, thanks so much for coming on. I'm so thrilled to call you a friend and an expert in LinkedIn. We'd love to have you back at some point, but wanted to give everyone a little taste of virality on LinkedIn organically. So thanks so much for joining us. Mark Williams 57:30 Thanks, buddy. It's been great fun. AJ Wilcox 57:32 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. AJ Wilcox 57:53 All right. So like Mark mentioned, his LinkedIn profile is linked right in the show notes. So go check that out, go connect with him, go follow him, whatever. Also go right into your podcast player right now. Or maybe pull over if you're driving, but go look up the LinkedInformed Podcast. I'm sure you'll enjoy it just as much as I do. You can also check out his website LinkedInformed.com. If you or anyone else you're training or you know is looking for a course on LinkedIn Ads, I point them towards the link in the show notes below. For the course that I did on LinkedIn Learning about LinkedIn Ads. It's by far the highest quality and the lowest cost training out there, last I checked. Please remember to subscribe if this is your first time with us. And if this is your second or greater time listening to the show, please do rate and review us. I would love to shout you out live on the show with questions, suggestions, anything about the podcast, email us here at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Episode on average benchmarks to shoot for Episode on boosting posts Episode on segmentation NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.   Show Transcript Is it time to fire your agency that's managing your LinkedIn Ads? I'm going to walk you through what your agency should be doing 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. Because we run a LinkedIn Ads agency, we really get a front row seat into the tactics and management that other agencies are doing for their clients. We get to audit their accounts and take over accounts that they used to manage. We also realize that not everyone is able to work with us. So in this episode, we're going to be covering a lot of what expert management of a LinkedIn Ads account looks like. And of course, if you're an agency, and you're not doing some of these things, take the advice to heart and see if you can improve. A lot of these things are hard lessons that we ourselves have learned over time, and we've even lost clients over. So we're holding ourselves just as accountable to the standards, as well as you and we're trying to always improve. We've certainly learned from some bar mistakes. And that's what this episode is all about. And we hope that this will help you better evaluate the service that you're getting, so that you can get it elevated. And of course, if you're not an agency, if you're managing your LinkedIn Ads strategy in house, I do hope that you'll get some value from this about how you can improve your own strategy as well. And if you think we missed anything here, let us know in the comments, or shoot us an email so that we can include it in future episodes. First in the news, I got an interesting email from LinkedIn this week that was titled Inaccurate Engagement Reporting for your LinkedIn Video Ads. It says between December 2021, and January 2022, we discovered and fixed an issue that may have affected some metrics for sponsored video ads. Due to a technical error, you may have also viewed inaccurate campaign data for the timeframe of September 23 2021 to November first 2021, we recommend that you consider generating a new report for more accurate metrics. So this is really interesting, what it looks like LinkedIn did is they noticed that there were some over reporting going on in their campaigns. We've seen the same thing from Facebook, so this isn't a huge surprise. But they've now corrected it. And if you've already generated that data, you can go back to those time periods and regenerate your reporting. This happened to probably eight different accounts that we were managing during that time period. So you may want to go take a look at your ad account and see if you had some missed reporting happening during that time as well. We also noticed this week that LinkedIn's new navigation features are back, it doesn't look like anything changed. They took it off the market for a little bit and now it's back on. If you notice any changes, feel free to let us know, but it looks pretty similar to us. Okay, that's it for the news. Let's hit it. From my experience, there aren't very many add professionals out there with a lot of experience in LinkedIn specifically. And LinkedIn is very much a different beast, it appears quite similar to Facebook in a lot of regards, but the strategies are totally different. So in this first section, I'm going to be sharing a lot of the qualitative nature of maybe how you can feel out how experienced your ad manager is, there are a lot of questions that you can ask and just gauge from their response, how adept they are at it. And I should mention that everyone has to start somewhere. And I'm not saying that you shouldn't work with someone who doesn't have a ton of experience. But I would just hope that you would ensure that you're not paying premium rates for less than premium service. If someone is just dipping their toe in the waters and learning LinkedIn ads, you shouldn't be getting charged rates that are maybe for experienced agencies. First off, you can ask them about their experience on the platform, and just get a very direct answer from them, how many accounts they've managed, how much spend, how long they've been on it. Listen for how they talk about general strategy, how do they talk about how they utilize LinkedIn as different ad objectives? Or how they think about the different ad types? How do they use them strategically? Or how do they use them in tandem with your goals? A really big one is how do they talk about bidding and budgeting? Because those things are really crucial in getting low costs from LinkedIn. Because the network is already so expensive, it's really important to make sure that you're getting the best costs possible. How do they talk about different offers? Do they take a one size fits all kind of approach? Or do they work with you to strategically select offers, and they have a scientific approach to that level of testing? Find out what resources they use to stay educated. Obviously, if they're listening to this podcast, that's a great indicator they care enough to stay up on a topic and dive in really deep, but find out what other types of resources they're including and they're using. It's also good if they're doing their own testing on other ad accounts to try to learn, but obviously, you may not want to be an agency's guinea pig as they're testing new strategies that aren't proven. You might want to ask them about how often they refresh ad creative, and how often they do new ad launches, how they determine when something is old and saturated, and now needs to be replaced? Do you catch them just parroting back what they've heard from LinkedIn? Or did they talk more from experience? And not that it's a bad thing to do what LinkedIn recommends, but if they take all of LinkedIn's advice, they may not have very much experience or done much testing themselves. And then you have to ask yourself, why not just let your LinkedIn account rep do all of the management, if your agency is just taking all of their advice anyway? Here's some things that are more about the marketer themselves. Every time you talk to them, do you learn something new? That could be an indication of how excited they are about their craft? And truly how deep their knowledge base goes? Do you feel like you can trust them? Have they lost any of your trust by maybe flaking out on something they promised to do, but didn't end up doing? Or have they been wrong on something and you've caught them in being wrong? And if you do catch them being incorrect on something, do they freely admit their mistake and take ownership? Are they honest? Are they transparent? I know it's a big deal to me, when I'm working with someone, I don't expect everyone to be perfect. But I do expect that they will own up to a mistake. If every time you talk to someone about something that has happened wrong, and it's always someone else's fault. It's always someone else's problem. They always have a great excuse for why they didn't play a part in that, that's a good sign that you've got someone who isn't willing to admit their own mistakes. And I lose respect very quickly for those kinds of people who can't admit when they're wrong. Are they constantly giving recommendations for ways to improve the account? And how about the attention they provide to you? Do they take a long time to reply? Do you get short answers or answers that feel like they didn't really read your email? These could be a signal that you're not really a valuable client to them. And maybe it's because your account is maybe on the smaller end of what they usually manage. Or maybe they specialize in another platform and LinkedIn Ads is just kind of a bolt on for them. So they can't really give it all that much attention. And of course, we know that an agency can't act like an internal employee. You can't expect an agency to reply immediately and go and do tons of tasks for you like an internal marketer would. The way that the agency model is set up is that account manager usually has multiple accounts, and multiple other clients that they're managing. So we definitely accept the fact that they're not going to act like an internal employee, but we do expect that they're going to give you good responses, good service, and obviously try to respond quickly. Are they constantly coming to you with new thoughts and strategies about the platform? Do they stay up to date on LinkedIn Ads trends and new products that LinkedIn is coming out with? Are they willing to test new things? Or even be the ones suggesting new tests? How ofte are they in communication with you? Do you sometimes go days or weeks without hearing from them? Or do you feel like if you weren't bugging them, would you never hear from them? This one really bothers me. Did someone sell you, but then when it came to actually get started, they pawned you off onto some marketer who has much less experience and maybe they're overburdened and responsible for way too many things or other channels? That feels like a little bit of a bait and switch to me. And during that sales process, I would share hope they are being really upfront about who's actually doing the management. And of course, like we've said, everyone needs to start somewhere. So definitely no knocks on having an entry level person managing an account, but if they're brand new to LinkedIn, and responsible for running Google and Facebook, too, there's no way that they're going to be hyper trained and knowledgeable enough for years. We get around this a little bit because we focus only on LinkedIn Ads. And so it's one channel that we have to train our employees on. So we can get them up to speed much, much faster than if we were trying to train them across multiple channels. How about are they honest about their performance? Do you catch them maybe taking credit for something that occurred on a different channel? Or that someone else did? Did they try to sugarcoat their metrics? And if something isn't working, are they flexible? Can they pivot strategies and think outside the box? Do they seem overly optimistic about performance? Are they trying to sugarcoat like we've talked about, if they're telling you that everything's looking really good, but when you look at it, it doesn't feel like it's doing that great. Maybe they're just trying to keep you as a customer longer by giving you a good report and lulling you into thinking that things are going well, when they may not be. How about how do they handle your concerns? Do they just brush them off? Or do they address them head on? Some marketers like to act arrogant, like you're stupid and that they know what's better? And usually, to me, this feels like a defense mechanism for someone who doesn't feel comfortable managing what they are, and I would hope that you're not being subjected to something like that. Okay. Here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into the quantitative measures on how you can evaluate your agency. The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. 10:15 We as marketers want to be where our customers are. If you're a B2B company, chances are LinkedIn is the channel that you'll want to be on. But this is a platform that's both expensive and cumbersome by nature. It takes an expert to tame the beast that is LinkedIn Ads. If you want to get the right message to your ideal customer at the lowest possible costs, B2Linked is the agency for you. We've learned the ins and outs of LinkedIn Ads. For the past eight years, we've spent over $150 million on the platform. And we're official LinkedIn partners. So you'll be working with LinkedIn Ads experts from day one. You can apply to work with us on the contact page of B2Linked.com. We'd absolutely love the opportunity to work with you. Alright, let's go ahead and jump into it. What about performance? Are they hitting your goals and getting good performance? One great way of telling this is comparing them with benchmarks to see if they're outperforming or underperforming, what the averages are on the network. To understand the benchmarks, go back and listen to episode 15, where we go really deep into that. If they're below benchmark, which happens because marketing is all about constantly testing. And we never know what's going to work and what won't. But if it's below average, are they making optimizations and trying to get them above. LinkedIn doesn't have a change history like Google does. So you can't go in and see how many changes or how often changes are happening in the account. But at least if you see real effort, that could be a clue that you've got someone good working on your account. Is your click traffic or your leads, actually, within your ideal customer persona? There's a lot of tools that LinkedIn gives us to be able to narrow down your lead quality, and make sure it's the very, very best leads that you're bringing in. So if you're seeing a lot of low quality leads, or people outside of your ideal persona coming through in your leads, and they're not doing anything about it, that may be a clue that they don't totally know what they're doing. You'd certainly want to see them going in and actively adding exclusions and trimming audience targeting down to adjust and make sure you're getting the very best. What about this? Are they invested in performance further down the funnel? Or are they focused just on the front end data that they can get from campaign manager? This is a little bit challenging, because a lot of marketers aren't technical enough. They're maybe not super skilled at CRMs, or Excel, but if they're not technical enough to blend the front end data from LinkedIn campaign manager, and the back end data from your CRM, maybe they've got an internal resource that they could bring who is able to do that. You just want to make sure they're not leaving you high and dry, or saying something like, well, that's not possible when it actually is. What about what features they're using? You could ask if they're using audience expansion, that is immediately a red flag that they probably don't know what they're doing, because I've never seen a case where audience expansion performed well. Are they using lead gen forms? Lead gen forms generally have a much higher conversion rate, but sales will talk about them, resulting in a lower quality lead. So it's very worth comparing between lead gen forms and landing pages. If they've just defaulted to one and they haven't asked you about the other, then that could be a red flag. Or they asking about getting access to your CRM, or being able to report from the data in your CRM. That is super important on LinkedIn. If they only boost posts, that could be a clue that they are really experienced in Facebook, but don't really know LinkedIn all that well. Go back and listen to episode 51 all about boosting posts. What about the bidding method that they're using? If they're only using the defaults for anything, that could be a clue that they don't really know what they're doing. We found that if click through rate is really good max delivery is the best way to bid. Most of the time click through rates are in that position where it's actually better to pay by cost per click. And if they're only using one bid type, that could be a clue that they don't know what they're doing. What about the targeting? Are they targeting too broadly? Do they have multiple job functions or multiple types of personas, all lumped in one, same campaign? Go back and listen to the last episode, Episode 65, all about segmentation. Also look at your audience sizes. If every audience is over about 150,000 people, generally that tells me they don't have a solid targeting strategy. So that's worth looking at for sure. Do they do all of their analysis inside of campaign manager? Or do they pull data out into Excel or some other dashboard where they can get a deeper look? There are a lot of insights that you can only get by bringing the data into a different platform. So I hope they are. Here's a really big one for me. There are a lot of agencies that won't actually give the client access to the LinkedIn Ads account. That lack of transparency really bothers me as a marketer, because they could be doing things like misreporting, lying to you about what your data is doing, or telling you certain costs, but then adding a markup on there, which you may not want to be paying. If you do have access to the account, and I really hope you do, you can do a little bit of analysis yourself and see do your numbers that you see match up with what the agency is showing you. That could be a great way to compare and see if they're being totally transparent and honest. So I hope these were helpful and understanding what your agency should be doing, or at least could be doing. And certainly, I hope it's helpful for you internal marketers to help you manage your own account better. Is there anything that you look for that we might have missed? Shoot us an email or leave us a comment? We'd absolutely love to include it in a future episode. 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. 16:12 All right down in the show notes, you'll see links to Episode 15 that's all about benchmarks. So you can compare your performance and see how you're actually doing. Episode 51 we do a call out to and it's all about boosting posts so make sure you listen to that one. If that's something that you're curious about. I also just barely mentioned the episode on segmentation. It was the most recent episode, you've probably listened to it if you're listening to this one. But if not go back and listen to it. It's definitely one of the ones that you'll need to listen to. If you're trying to learn more about LinkedIn Ads. Or if you have a colleague who is, go check out the course that I did on LinkedIn Learning. The link is right down in the show notes and it is by far the highest quality course and the course with the lowest cost out there for LinkedIn Ads right now. So check that one out and look down at your podcast player right now. If you're not already subscribed to this podcast, hit that subscribe button. We'd love to have you around next episode. And please do go leave us a review. We absolutely love to hear from you. We get emails all the time from you about what you're learning from the podcast and what you're getting out of it. Please go leave those in the reviews so other people get the news about what they should be learning as well. With any questions, future topics or feedback to the show, email us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Ad Scheduling Account Organization NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.   Show Transcript Micro segmentation of your LinkedIn Ads. Your LinkedIn Rep says it's a bad idea. I say it's great. Let's discuss why this strategy is so divisive. 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 LinkedIn Rep may have warned you against something called micro segmentation, which is what they call it when you create a campaign that has too few members and your target audience. Now, I highly recommend micro segmentation. But our definitions are very different. On this episode, we'll dive into how you can use segmentation to get better ad performance, easier reporting, and definitely to learn more about who your target audience is, and what they engage with. Let's jump right in and hit it. And definitely the next time I decided to coin a term, I'm going to try to make sure that it doesn't match what a LinkedIn Rep warns you against. So everyone knows that LinkedIn ads is great for lead generation. That is, of course, why we come to the platform is access to an ultra premium audience. But a little known fact about LinkedIn Ads is that it's also spectacular for market research. And by market research, I'm not saying run ads, asking people about what they think about your company or anything like that. But you probably already have a good idea of who your ideal customer persona is, right? That's why you're using LinkedIn Ads. So you can target exactly those people. So for example, let's say that your ideal target audience is decision makers in IT. It would be really easy to create one campaign targeting the IT job function, and then layer in all seniorites that or manager and above. And you can run that and that's totally fine. But then after you've run that campaign, you don't get any sort of understanding further about your audience, you might get good ad performance, you might get bad ad performance somewhere in between. But ultimately, because you don't have anything to compare this against, you are left with no levers to pull. So instead, imagine that instead of that one campaign, you've created four separate campaigns. One is IT with a manager seniority. Another one might be IT with a director seniority, another might be IT with a VP seniority. And then finally, your fourth one would be IT with a CXO seniority. So let's say you are running an AB test to this audience, well, you put the same AB test in each of those four campaigns and now you're targeting the same size of audience, you didn't have to create many more ads, you just created the same to over and over again, but now you have four campaigns that you can compare against each other, to learn more about what different segments of your audience are doing, what they like, what they engage with. By doing this, you can get some insights like for instance, maybe CIOs convert higher to the lead. But maybe they're harder for the sales team to get a hold of for a demo. So their cost per SQL ends up being higher. And maybe IT managers have a higher cost per click, but they're easier for sales to get an appointment with. So maybe they have initial higher costs, but when you let it all bake out in your sales funnel, it all of a sudden makes a lot more sense. I like to do this basically, anytime that I'm targeting an audience with multiple singularities. I'll break up that audience by seniority, so I can learn who likes what content. You might see that certain offers are interesting to those who are VP and above. And other offers are more interesting to those who are like manager and director level. And this is really easy to do, you could do the same thing by segmenting by industry. So for instance, let's say you're going after tech companies, what you could do is take LinkedIn's industry of internet, which is obviously very broad. It includes things like Google and Facebook, and Snapchat are all classified as internet. And then you might do a separate campaign for anyone who says that they're in computer software. And then if you compare these results against each other, you might find that one industry actually produces higher quality leads than another. And if you can figure that out early, great. Now you can pare down your budget for the one that isn't working, and feed the one who is and get more of those high quality leads that your sales team loves. A lot of times I'll see campaigns that either clients have been running before they've come to us, or accounts that I'm auditing. And I'll see that they'll have one campaign with a whole bunch of different job functions. So let's say marketing, and accounting, and business development are all in the same campaign. And when you ask them about it, they'll say, well, our message really is irrelevant to all of those people. And I'm not disagreeing with that fact. Your message could be really good for all those people. But the fact that they are all lumped into the same broad campaign means that you'll never learn. Whereas if you broke it out, you might find that, oh, wow, accountants don't interact with this at all. So hey, maybe we spend less on them or maybe we create a custom Add Variation just for the accountants. And this is data that you would only know if you've broken them out. To learn more, you've got to have them in different audiences. We've done the same thing with geographies. So of course, if you're advertising to a whole bunch of different countries, you know that the culture in each of those countries is going to be very different. And so if you haven't broken them out, you might not be able to tell. The big one I remember from my past, I was advertising for franchises in all of North America. And I found that Canada was not converting very well at all. And I had no idea why it eventually dawned on me that in my form, I was asking for a zip code. And in Canada, they don't call it a zip code, they call it a postal code. And so it was very, very apparent that I was an American, trying to advertise to Americans, and just added Canada on. So as soon as I gave them their own form, conversion start flowing in. So you can do this, if you are going after all North America. Or maybe you're advertising to all English speaking countries, like the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, as long as your audience sizes are large enough, in each of those countries by themselves. If you give them their own campaign, it then allows you to suss out and find what are those cultural differences that are making people convert higher, interact higher, convert lower, interact lower, we've even done this in the US with time zones. So we'll add all of the states that are in the Pacific Time Zone, to their own campaign, all states that are mountain time into their own campaign, Central Time, Eastern Time Zone, etc. And by doing that, it allows us to do some really cool day parting. Because if you start showing ads to people on the East Coast, at 6am, their time, you'll all of a sudden be advertising to people on the west coast at 3am, which isn't a great time to be advertising. So if you've put them in different time zones, and then you're turning your campaigns on and off at those times, it's gonna be a lot more exact, you won't waste your money nearly as much. If you want to dive more into day parting and ad scheduling, definitely check out episode 63. 7:31 We also really like to segment by company size. So what you can do is say, hey, if we go after all companies that are size 200. and above, well, let's put 200 to 500 in its own campaign, and then 500 to 1000 in its own campaign, and then maybe 1000 to 5000 in its own, and then 5000 and above in its own. And now all of a sudden you get to judge what is your cost per lead by company size. And a lot of sales teams will look at a company size to tell you what quality of lead that is. And they care more about the larger companies, because they're gonna have a lot more budget to do this. And that's super easy to do exactly like we talked about earlier. And there's a whole lot of other segments that you can also break up campaigns by, for instance, you could do field of study. So what did someone study in college, you can do growth rate of a company, those that are growing slowly versus those that are rapidly growing, and message them differently, you can really segment by any sort of targeting that is broad. And what I mean by broad, it means that there are a few options that broadly define the entire market, it doesn't usually make sense to do this to segment by job title, or by group. Because when you put one set of people into a group, or specify one job title, and then you specify another, you're still leaving out a huge chunk of the population. This isn't a great way of splitting the audience up to learn more about it, you're going to end up with really small target audiences. So think about how you can break up by some of those elements like seniority or job function, industry, geography, company size, those types of things. Plus, it really didn't cost you anything extra to break out all of these micro segments of your audience. But now you can test all of your offers and motivations to find out what engages and drives each micro segment of your target audience. Plus, now you have all these extra levers that you can pull when you want to improve performance. So for instance, if you're pacing ahead of budget one month, it's really easy to just go down and bid down the lowest performing micro segments. And that's going to naturally push your ad performance higher while restricting the budget. Or maybe your sales team tells you that certain types of leads are worth more to them. They're a higher quality lead, so you can bid down or shut off the micro segments that are pulling your performance down and feed the ones that are more like what sales wants. And since you already have these campaigns, you can take it a step further by adjusting your ad copy to talk directly to the people. For instance, in the past, when I was going after business owners or CEOs, I would put in the ad copy, "Hey CEOs" to try to get their attention. Because you've already defined who your audience is in these little micro segments, if you can think of a call out to them that they would recognize, this becomes a test that you can easily do to call out to people. One thing that I noticed when I was doing this, calling out to people by some sort of an identity, it certainly makes sense sometimes when they identify themselves by that entity. But sometimes you'll call out to people, and they don't define themselves by that. So for instance, if I were going after marketing directors, if I shout out to them, "Hey Directors", they may not actually identify themselves, strongly by the fact that they're a director, they might identify themselves more powerfully as marketers, so I might do better to say, "Hey Marketers", or "Hey Marketing Leaders". Okay, here's a quick sponsor break. And then we'll dive into how you can actually use these micro segments to optimize and control your account performance. 11:26 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you, B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $150 million on LinkedIn Ads, and no one outperforms us on getting you the lowest cost per lead, and the most scale. We're official LinkedIn partners and you'll deal only with LinkedIn Ads, experts from day one. Apply to work with us on the contact page of B2Linked.com, we'd absolutely love to get to work with you. Alright, let's go ahead and jump into how you can actually control and optimize your account when you have these micro segments. So I use the example before how if you're pacing ahead of budget, you can turn some things off that aren't super helpful to your account. Every so often, a client will come to us mid month and say, for some reason, my boss just cut our budget in half for this month, we have to slow things way down. Well, if the account has an average cost per lead of like $80, for instance, it's really quick to go and segment all of my campaigns by their cost per lead, and sort from high to low. And all of a sudden, here's this list of the 20 campaigns that are bringing leads in for significantly more than that. So I have some that are bringing in leads for $100 and some $150 and $250, for instance. So we're reacting to a pretty urgent call from the client to cut down on budget and spend less. But by doing it this way, we go in and pause all of the campaign's that are performing worse than average, we've stopped spending as rapidly. And now we don't have spend going to those campaigns that are having a high cost per lead. So as we're cutting down on our spend, we're also watching our average cost per lead drop. So it was an ad. And after cutting out the higher CPL campaigns, we might be averaging 60 or 50. And it's a great way to finish that month, especially if we know that we had less budget to work with. We had a client who was in the business financing space, and they had three different industries they were going after. So naturally, we had the campaigns all segmented out by industry and we found that the retail industry for whatever reason, was underperforming compared to the others. And so it was really easy to go through as a blanket change and pause or bid down all of the retail industry segments. And we put that budget into the to other industries that were performing well. And it's important to know that if you had all three of these industries lumped into the same campaign, you would have totally missed that fact that that was an optimization you could do. If you haven't listened to episode seven, where we talk about account organization, you'll definitely want to go and listen to that. Because I recommend a campaign naming structure that identifies within the campaign name exactly who that audience is. And what's so cool about this is when we micro segment and we're describing who the audience is right within the campaign name, it makes reporting super easy, and gives you capabilities that you wouldn't have otherwise. So for instance, if all of your campaigns that are targeting directors have something like DIR for director in them, when you go to start your campaigns and look at the results by campaign, you can very quickly find all of those that are targeting directors. And if you find that directors are performing really well, great, you now know all of the campaigns to go and increase your bids on or give some expanded budget. Also in our campaigns, we identify the type of targeting we're using. So we might put JF in a campaign name, when it's targeting by job function, we might put JT, if it's targeting by job title. Then when we get all of the results, let's say from the whole sales funnel, we can very quickly combine in a pivot table all of those audience names, and combine all of the performance from job title targeting versus job function versus skills targeting versus groups targeting. And we'll find some things like oh, wow, job function over here is more expensive, or leads to more volume, or groups targeting is really, really limited on audience size. But boy, it's efficient when it works. So definitely go back and listen to episode seven to get more information about how we do that so you can do the same thing. 15:57 I'm sure many of you already know my feelings on using audience expansion on LinkedIn. Let me tell you why I hate it. Because it is exactly the opposite of micro segmentation. We're talking about taking specific audiences and breaking them out so that we can compare them against each other and learn from the differences. Well, when you use audience expansion, it takes an existing large audience, and it adds people to it, that you don't know who they are. You don't get to gauge the quality of that audience until later when your sales team comes to you and says, hey, the quality of leads have been really crappy recently. So not only are you giving LinkedIn the opportunity to insert low quality audiences into your campaign, but it mashes those audiences together in a really opaque or non transparent way, and makes it impossible to actually learn from. So if you want to expand on your audiences, I would highly recommend go and create a look alike audience instead, because at least a look alike audience will allow you to run the native audience and the look alike that was created from it separately. And now you can compare and find out like, oh, look alikes are performing well, or no, they're not, we should stop doing that. So please, please, please, if you have audience expansion turned on anywhere in your account, please go turn it off. You can thank me later. So I can already hear a couple of you saying like, well, if I break out all of my audiences into micro segments, that's a lot of campaigns to manage. And yeah, that's the truth, you may be managing more campaigns, but it only takes a few minutes to create a duplicate of a campaign. And so the rewards of doing this are much, much higher than I feel like what the cost increase is for you in managing the account in your time. Plus, we manage accounts with 1000s of campaigns in them. So I can tell you, it's definitely scalable, it's possible, you're not going to make a huge mistake by breaking things out to learn more about your audience. It's also really likely that you're not going to be running all of these campaigns forever. Because once you find those micro audience segments that are underperforming in comparison to others, you can always cut them out by pausing. I mean, obviously, pausing is the best way, but you could always bid them down if you just wanted to get their costs lower. And when you take those campaigns out of the mix, you're giving yourself fewer campaigns to manage. I can also hear some of you saying, Well, my LinkedIn Rep says that I should only run campaigns that have an audience size of at least 300,000. Well, by breaking up your existing audiences into smaller segments, you're still targeting the same audience size in total. So you can tell your LinkedIn Rep, we're still targeting the same people, they're just in more campaigns. Plus, now you'll see better performance with your ability to turn off or bid down any segments of the non performers, which you wouldn't even be able to tell were being targeted before when it was just one big lump campaign. And my opinion is, you're already paying a premium for using LinkedIn, which means you're paying more for LinkedIn leads than you are under their channels. So why not have that budget also give you insights into the behavior of your customer persona. Plus, everyone who's running LinkedIn ads is always looking for ways of decreasing costs, because costs are already so high. This is one of the ways that you can do that really effectively. All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around 19:29 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. All right, here are a couple of great resources for you. Number one, go check out Episode 63 on ad scheduling. To find out how we schedule our ads at different times of day and different days of the week. Check out Episode 07 about account organization for how you can make it easier to report and easier to find insights. If you or someone on your team are looking to learn more about LinkedIn Ads, check out the course that I did on LinkedIn Learning with LinkedIn. The link is right there in the show notes below. And this is by far the least expensive, and the best quality course out there. If you're a new listener to the show, hit that subscribe button. So you can hear more of this when we come out with new episodes weekly. And please do consider rating. And definitely leave us a review on the podcast. We would absolutely love to hear what you think. And when you leave a review, we'll shout you out live on the show. With feedback or suggestions on the podcast, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Cost Cap Bidding Targeting Strategies Key to Efficient Scale NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.   Show Transcript With LinkedIn Ads, you can either increase efficiency or volume. But wait, can you have both? Here's a strategy you'll need to know about 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. So there's a common misconception that you can't increase ad efficiency at the same time as you're increasing your lead volume. And there is a lot of merit to this argument, it really makes sense. But due to some of the nuances of the LinkedIn Ads platform, as well as some of the strategies I'm about to teach you, I'm excited to let you know that you can actually do both, you can have the best of both worlds, you can have that cake and also eat it too. Make no mistake about it. This is secret sauce, and I'm letting you in on it. So please do show your gratitude by leaving a review on the show. The most common place to do this is within Apple podcasts. So if you're listening on an Apple device, it should be easy to navigate over there. Otherwise, open up iTunes and look up the show B2Linked. And honestly, there's nothing you could do that would make me happier.  In the news. I'm back after my Alaskan cruise. And I'll tell you it was fantastic. Thank you everyone for your patience as I did skip an episode. I did get to go dog sledding, I got to see whales and glaciers, and go canoeing and jeeping and kayaking. And those of you who know me well know I don't get cold very often. And I always get sunburned. You'll be pleased to know that even in Alaska, I only had to wear a jacket twice, and I came back with no sunburns. I came back to a good friend Glenn Schmelzle from MarketingWhatsNew. He sent me an update about something that's going on inside of campaign manager. He sent me the screenshot, and I'm actually not sure where to find the screenshot, so you may see it within your accounts. But it starts, "We recognize the importance of continuously investing in our technology to deliver solutions that help you reach your marketing goals, and are excited to bring you an important update today. In order to offer more precise campaign cost control for our advertisers, we have decided to sunset target cost bidding within campaign manager. In its place, we'll be launching cost cap bidding, which will offer greater cost control, even for cost per lead, as well as improved ROI. While target cost bidding allows a range of costs, cost cap bidding will cap your average bid so that you don't spend more than your desired amount. Among this updated bidding product suite, you will be able to confidently choose a bid strategy that best suits your campaign goals. There will be no changes made to your current target cost bidding campaigns, and you may run your existing target cost bidding until completion. However, starting on April 18 of 2022, LinkedIn will gradually close access to target cost bidding and advertisers will begin to lose the ability to create new target cost campaigns. We encourage you to try cost cap bidding instead." And there's a button to learn more. Down in the show notes below, you'll see a link to where you can click on the Help Center article all about cost cap bidding. So you can go and do more research there. But basically, if I can distill it down for you, target cost bidding is being phased out. And thank goodness because we have tested it extensively and found no scenario where it provided a lower cost or a higher quality of lead. And it's being replaced with cost cap bidding, which actually seems really similar to Google's target CPA bidding. It looks like you're going to be able to choose an optimization goal. So maybe that is clicks, the landing pages, or clicks on the ad, or a video view or even a lead. And you'll be able to bid a certain amount for each one of those actions. And then the system will go into this learning phase where it's adjusting your bids up and down trying to find the highest number of those key actions that you're looking for, at the lowest cost or at least around the cost of what you're bidding. And then after that learning phase, LinkedIn is probably going to attempt to bid over time so that your key action averages about what your bidding was, in principle, I'm actually really excited about this rollout. We'll definitely need to test it out to see if LinkedIn's auction is smart enough to actually find the right people at lower costs. Since the platform doesn't really have a track record of being able to do this well in the past. This episode is brought to you by B2Linked. 4:32   The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, The LinkedIn Ads experts. If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $150 million on LinkedIn Ads, and no one outperforms us on getting you the lowest cost per lead at the most scale. We are official LinkedIn partners, and you'll deal only with LinkedIn Ads experts from day one. Apply to work with us on the contact page of B2Linked.com. We'd absolutely love the opportunity to get to work with you.  Alright, let's jump into this efficiency versus volume argument. I've heard this said by especially web development agencies or other agencies who build something concrete for a client, you can have something in high quality at a fast speed and low cost, pick two of them, but you can't have three. And what that means is, if you need something fast, chances are you won't get quality, or you need something at low cost, you probably won't be able to get it fast if you want good quality. And this is what was going through my mind when at a previous company, my boss doubled my budget one month, because things were doing so well with LinkedIn Ads. And she said, let's double our budget, but I also want you to decrease our cost per lead. And I went back to her and said, actually, you can't have both, we can't be doubling our budget, and decreasing our costs per lead at the same time. They are diametrically opposed ideas. The actions that you would take to increase your budget, that way, means bidding up, which automatically means you won't be able to lower your costs per lead. But then later, I figured out a strategy where you actually can have both. And I'm going to lay out this strategy for you. The way that this works, is, we have so many different campaigns, targeting our ideal audiences. And because we're targeting with different targeting facets, in a lot more campaigns, we actually are able to reach more of our ideal target persona. But then because we have them all in separate campaigns, all of these micro segments, which we're actually going to cover on one of the next two podcast episodes, so make sure you listen to this. Because we have these micro segments all set up, we're going to find some that perform better than others. And so what we can do, by increasing the number of campaigns and the number of ways that we're targeting these ideal prospects, we're going to find that some of these campaigns are costing more or costing less or are about average. And what that means is you can start to bid down or shut off the poor performers. And you can bid up and give additional budget to those that are high performing. And I'll give you an example here. So let's say you do some analysis, and you find that you have three campaigns that have a cost per lead of about $200. Then you have another 10 campaigns, which are all performing at about average, about $100 per lead. And then you have another three campaigns that are running at a cost per lead of about $50. So you've got your three campaigns that are poor performers, you have three campaigns that are performing really well, and 10 that are kind of in between, if I want to both increase my spend, and decrease my cost per lead, what I can do is I can go into those three campaigns that have the $200 CPL, and I can bid them down. So let's say we're bidding at $12 per click. I could bid those down to 10, or $8, per click. And because I decrease them, we're going to see less volume from them. But the volume that we do get is probably going to perform closer to our $100 cost per lead average. And what about those 10 campaigns that have a cost per lead of around $100. So this is about average, and we're okay with this. We could go in and increase their budgets just in case they are budget limited. And all of a sudden, overnight, these campaigns that were spending, let's say they're spending their budget of $10 a day per campaign, if we increase that to $20, or $30 per day, all of a sudden, these campaigns are pushing more volume at exactly the same efficiency, we've increased their budget, and they're still paying about $100 per lead. So we're just getting more volume. And then we turn our attention to those three campaigns that have a cost per lead of around $50, which is really low for us. What I would do then is I would increase the budget here, give these campaigns as much leeway or legroom as you can possibly give them. And if they're way outperforming, if they're at $50 per lead, what if we bid up. If we bid up, maybe they actually start creeping closer to those $100 cost per lead, but we're able to get a lot higher volume of them. So as you can see, we've lowered our overall cost per lead significantly, we might have taken our overall cost per lead from let's say, like $140, all the way down to $100. And we've actually been able to double, triple or quadruple our total spend. So we've talked about being able to set up a whole bunch of different types of campaigns with different targeting. If you go all the way back to episode two of the podcast, we talk about this. But basically there are four standard ways that you can usually target someone on LinkedIn. That's by job title by job function with seniority, by skill with seniority. And finally, number four by groups with seniority. And don't jump too far ahead, make sure you listen to the one of the next couple episodes where we talk about segmentation. But then you can go and segment your audiences by things like company size, by job function, by seniority, by geography, etc. And what it does is it gives you a lot of different campaigns that are now hyper targeted. So what you do then is watch the performance, you're going to find some poor performing campaigns that you can either bid down or shut off entirely, you'll find some good performers that you can bid up and budget up, just try to add more fuel to them. And then as you look in your CRM and talk to your sales team, you'll find some of these that create higher quality leads. And you'll want to give more fuel to those targeting options and campaigns. To get more of those high quality leads out of them. We had two different clients that we implemented the strategy for. And overnight, we had a SAS tool for targeting accountants, we increased their budget by 9x overnight, and cost per lead actually dropped while we were doing this. We did the same thing for another client in the finance space. They 10x their budget overnight, and cost per lead stayed right about the same. And this is of course, the key to efficient scaling on LinkedIn, make sure you go back and listen to episode 39 for more on this. If you choose not to use this strategy, I'm going to let you in on how your scaling is going to work. Let's say you get 20% more budget, you're going to go into your few campaigns, and you're going to bid them up by 20%. Your cost per lead will increase by 20%. That means your ROI goes down by 20%. So you got additional volume, but it cost more. Maybe that's okay, but maybe it's not. That's totally up to you to decide. But if you use this strategy that I'm outlining for you, you're going to get more qualified audiences, you're going to have more levers to pull, you'll then be able to use those to starve the poor performing campaigns and audiences and feed the great performers. You'll feed them by giving budget increases, and even bidding increases. You'll see your cost per lead overall account wide drop, which will cause your cost per lead to drop and your ROI to increase. All right, I know that this was a slightly shorter episode than normal so please let me know in the comments, or email us at Podcast@B2Linked.com to let us know. Do you love the shorter episodes? Do you want the longer ones? Definitely let us know. Okay, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around. 12:51   Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. All right down in the shownotes, you'll see the LinkedIn Help Center article about cost cap bidding. So as that's rolling out over the next couple of months, go check it out and see if you can build it into your strategy or at least test. And we'll of course cover it here as well. I mentioned episode 2 all about targeting strategies, you'll see the link to grab that episode. As well as episode 39 that's all about the key to efficient scaling on LinkedIn, for when you get additional budget. If you or anyone you know is looking to learn LinkedIn Ads. I'm the author of the course on LinkedIn learning around LinkedIn Ads. Check the link down below and go check out that course. It is by far the highest quality and the lowest cost for any LinkedIn Ads course you'll be able to find out there, guaranteed. Please do look down at whatever podcast player you're using and hit that subscribe button if you want to hear more of this next week or next month or however often you listen to these things. And as you're doing that, please do rate the podcast. It really helps. I know you don't think that it does, and it's going out of your way. But please, please please, it will do us wonders. And I would really appreciate it with any questions, suggestions, or even recommendations. Reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.   Show Transcript On this episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show, we're talking about the biggest oversight that LinkedIn made on their ad platform, the feature that is constantly requested. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn ads fanatics, whether you call it dayparting or ad scheduling, one of the most requested features that I've heard for LinkedIn ads is the ability to turn ads on and off at certain times of the day, or certain days of the week, or certain times of the week. I've personally asked LinkedIn for this at every chance I've gotten. And so far that request has fallen on deaf ears. Today, we're doing another deep dive. And we're talking about why dayparting is important, and how to analyze your traffic patterns during the day. In the news, by the time you hear this episode, I'll be on an Alaskan cruise. Now, I love cruises. But every time I've gone, it's been to somewhere warm with beaches. Well, it's no surprise, I'm a ginger, which means I'm naturally allergic to the sun. Seems like Alaska will be the perfect trip for my fair skin. This will be my first vacation since the beginning of COVID. And I'm excited to finally unplug. And I'm hopefully going to be back here in a couple weeks with a brand new action packed episode, and coming from a clear and rested brain. Alright, enough about me, let's go ahead and hit it. Alright, so what is dayparting or what is ad scheduling? This is simply the act of being able to turn your ads on and off during certain times. And of course, all of the major ad platforms have this. LinkedIn seems to be the only one who hasn't developed this feature. Facebook has it, Google has it, Microsoft ads, and probably honestly, everyone else. The reason why I call this LinkedIn biggest miss is that if you look at all the other platforms out there, traffic patterns are very undefined. But here you have LinkedIn, where people tend to use it on a normal schedule that you can predict because of business hours. We've had so many clients request, hey, we don't have a sales team in on Saturday on Sunday so we don't want to drive leads on those days, but let's keep running every other time. Or maybe you just only want to run during business hours. Or maybe you only want to run on weekends. Because LinkedIn traffic patterns are so predictable. It makes it really important to be able to define your traffic by what time of day and what day of the week, they're on the platform. So LinkedIn really is perfect for day parting, yet it hasn't ever developed it. An analysis that you can definitely do is go into campaign manager and export as much of your data as you can by day. And then what you can do is add in a new column in Excel for day of the week, then you can use an Excel formula based off of the date to figure out which day of the week it is, then with one pivot table, you're aggregating all of your ad performance data to find out which days of the week work best for you. I'm obviously breezing through this. This isn't a class on Excel. But we've done quite a bit of this and what we found is that, obviously, the weekends usually have less desktop traffic, a lot more mobile. So surprise, surprise, if you're advertising using text ads or dynamic ads, you're probably not going to see much action on the weekends as opposed to sponsored content and sponsored messaging, you'll probably see a lot more traffic on the weekends than the other ad formats. We generally find that Tuesday is the best day. It's the one with the most impressions, the most click volume. But we recently had a client where Tuesday was constantly the worst day. So don't always count on that. Monday and Wednesday usually are pretty top too, it's like, Tuesday is number one and then Monday and Wednesday are two and three. We consistently find that holidays don't perform very well. So if you're looking for a way to save your budget, it might be a good idea to pause on holidays. If you're going to do this analysis and start looking at your campaign performance by the day of the week, you'll probably want to compare things like your click through rate or your engagement rate. You'll probably want to look and see which days spend the most. Which ones have the highest cost per click or the highest cost per lead. And if you're not amazing in Excel, go grab one of your colleagues or coworkers who is and show them this segment. They'll know exactly what to do. All right, here's a quick sponsor break and then we'll dive into hourly analysis. 4:38 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com the LinkedIn Ads experts. If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you, B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $150 million on LinkedIn Ads so far, and no one outperforms us on getting you the lowest cost per lead and the most scale We are, of course, official LinkedIn partners and you'll deal only with LinkedIn Ads experts from day one. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com. We'd love to chat with you about your campaigns. All right, let's jump into an hourly analysis. So what's so interesting about the platform is LinkedIn does not give us hourly reporting, which means you might figure that certain hours of the day are less helpful to advertise during as others. And this is definitely true. So we've spent a lot of time on these analyses, and will tell you, it's a lot harder to get access to. If you really, really want to follow us on this, you can do this analysis, but fair warning, it's going to suck. It's not a fun process. What you have to do is log into your campaign manager account, every single hour on the hour and make note of all the stats. The number of impressions, the amount of spend, the number of clicks, number of leads, etc. And then every hour during the day that you get data, you subtract it from the data from the hour before leaving you with just the amount of data that was generated during that last hour. You're going to want to continue this for ideally, at least a week, like I said, it's totally going to suck. You're gonna have to get people from around the globe all helping you to do this. And then of course, you will have to adjust for some errors. Every so often, you'll log into campaign manager and the stats will have changed and you might find that during a certain hour, you see a negative value for number of impressions or amount of spend, that's hard to deal with. As a shameless plug, I will mention that if you don't want to do this, yourself, the clients that we work with, we do this analysis for them. Now, if you are going to do this yourself, I've got three suggestions for you. First of all, don't bid too high because that could cause you to run out of your budget before the whole day is complete. Let's say your budget ran out by 4pm, you'll notice a lot of zeros after 4pm that day until it resets for the day. On that same note, don't budget too low. You need to make sure that you have enough budget for the whole day. So again, you don't run out and have your ad stopped partially through the day. This analysis is much much better if you have high budgets and high bids because what that's going to give you is not just a limited amount of like the number of impressions by hour that your audience sees, but if you're bidding high enough or aggressively enough, that impression, volume by hour will show you what the traffic pattern of your ideal prospects looks like. And that can be really powerful. You might find that, wow, my audience starts to wake up around 6am. And it looks like they go into the office around 8am or start working around then you can see little bumps along the way. When we're doing this analysis, we're looking for things like which hours of the day have higher volume, or are less expensive, or have higher conversion rates. You want to take into account what your costs per click are during the day, or your cost per lead or conversion rates. And be aware, if you're analyzing your cost per lead and your conversion rates, you have to be using LinkedIn lead gen forms. You can't count on LinkedIn conversion tracking off of your website to allow you to do this because there is a significant delay that could land in the next hour or multiple hours later. So it's a lot better if you're using the lead gen forms. But look for the volume of clicks by hour. Look for your volume of impressions that tells you like when people are most active on the platform during the day, which days and which hours. And of course, look at your click through rates to see when people are paying the most attention. If you tell your LinkedIn rep that you're doing an analysis like this, a fair warning you will hear them say that when you pause a campaign, it resets your relevancy score. Well, this is absolutely not true from our experience. I say pause away. You have to ask yourself, why would LinkedIn be telling me this? Well, it's because they want your money. If you ever pause your account, less money is probably going to them. But let's dive in a little bit. Why would your relevancy score get reset if you paused? Well, I could see LinkedIn saying that if you pause an ad or a campaign for too long, then enough time has passed that maybe it's no longer timely to them. So they've got to reset the relevancy score to allow you to have your ad prove itself again. I've heard some reps suggest that maybe if you pause for two weeks at a time, maybe it resets it. But I would say it's really, really similar to launching a new ad where that campaign itself, if it has a high relevancy score, then the ad that you launched within it, whether it's an existing ad that's been unpaused after two weeks or something, or if it's a brand new ad, it's still gonna borrow from the relevancy score of the campaign. And so if your relevancy score is still strong, that ad should still be able to pick up fast and be good to go. So even if our relevancy score resets, I'm not too worried about it. But of course, if you have heard or experienced differently, please let me know. This is just from our experience. But I will say that we have done a lot of ad scheduling and day parting on the platform and we haven't noticed any deleterious effects from it. But if your experience is different, we would absolutely love to know. So make sure to email us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And let us know what you've seen. Once you've done this analysis, and you find out what times of day or what days of the week work better for you, it's time to actually try this out. You can either do this manually or with a third party tool that can pause and unpause your LinkedIn campaigns for you. But do make sure that you've done this analysis before you start day parting your campaigns. Because we don't want you to go in with the assumption that weekends or after hours are bad, you really need to run ads during those times, and then sample and actually do the analysis to prove it. Because if you are just randomly pausing or and pausing your account where you think, your results may not be what you're trying to go for. And of course, it goes without saying probably, but when you're thinking about what times do you pause, it probably makes sense to pause during those times where performance is lowest. I mentioned this is something we've asked LinkedIn a lot for, and they've never given it to us. So what we did is we actually built our own internal proprietary tool to do this day parting for us. And by doing it, we've seen some pretty extreme successes of being able to analyze and show ads only during specific times. If this is something you want help with, like I said, clients of B2Linked, we do this analysis for you so you don't have to do it yourself. So I realize this is a bit of a shameless plug, but we'd love to help you with this analysis and research and help you perform better. Plus day parting is not the only set of tools we've created. We've created the ability to create and edit both campaigns and ads in bulk. So when you work with us, we're able to move faster than anyone else can. If something's not working well, we can pivot quickly. And of course, we can launch faster to take more advantage of opportunities. I hope that I've provided enough value to all of you so that you don't mind a shameless plug every now and then. So I'll leave it there at that. Alright, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up so stick around. 12:29 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. Okay, resources for the episode. If you or someone you know is trying to learn LinkedIn Ads, check out the link down below in the show notes to the LinkedIn Learning course that I did on LinkedIn Ads. It's by far the most comprehensive and inexpensive course out there. And if I do say so myself being the author, it is really good. So definitely check that out. Also, on whatever podcast player you're listening to hit that subscribe button. And also please do rate us. And if you would be so kind, leave us a review as well. The reviews really, really help. You'd be doing me a giant favor. With any suggestions, questions feedback on the show, email us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Announcement about the left-hand navigation being reverted Offers Epsiode NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.   Show Transcript LinkedIn Sponsored Messaging, Message Ads, Sponsored InMail, Conversation Ads. These are the ad formats on LinkedIn that are most confusing, and also intriguing to advertisers. I'm about to demystify them on this episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. For years, I've been getting questions about the sponsored messaging ad formats on LinkedIn. And honestly, I've been waiting a long time to do this episode, I was waiting until I found a whole bunch of success with these ad formats. And honestly, I've been really disappointed. I was hoping to find a formula for what always works. But I've collected all of the opportunities for success that I've been able to find on this episode. And I'm excited to finally share them with you. First off in the news, LinkedIn has a little message across the top of every account that says we've temporarily changed the design of our navigation menu, learn more. You can click there to see the note in the Help section of LinkedIn, or just look in the show notes down below, I've linked to it there. And what they've explained is they've reverted the new left hand navigation experience that was released just in the last handful of weeks. And it's been temporarily reverted back to the old top navigation experience. I reached out to a contact at LinkedIn and I got the inside scoop. It turns out, they didn't revert it because of any bugginess or anything like that. It was actually the second order effects of it. They noticed that the new experience adversely affected advertiser behavior on the platform. I won't go any deeper into that. But just I expect that after they make some minor adjustments or improvements, we'll get it back, there wasn't a problem with the navigation experience itself. It's more about what us advertisers did after getting that navigation experience. Alright, with that, let's jump into the actual content. Let's hit it. So first off, you need to understand what the different ad formats on LinkedIn are. It's the whole class of ad formats that are pushed right to your messaging box. Rather than being seen somewhere else on LinkedIn. These are called Sponsored Messaging. And there are two different kinds of ad formats that fit underneath that umbrella, we have Message Ads, which used to be called Sponsored InMail. And then we have Conversation Ads, which are one of LinkedIn's newest ad formats. And it's that choose your own adventure kind of chat bot experience. And the way that they work is they show up directly inside of your message box when you're on LinkedIn. And the only way for you as an advertiser to pay is to pay per send. Now LinkedIn is only going to send these to people who are actively logged in. So thank goodness, you're not going to be paying for all of those inactive users who haven't opened their message box in a year or more. Now, I did get to use the message ads format back when it was Sponsored InMail back before it even came to Campaign Manager, it was when you used to have to work directly with a LinkedIn rep. And here's what it was like it was probably the worst investment I've ever made. It cost $3 per person you sent to. And so it landed in a bunch of inactive accounts. When I ran these years and years and years ago, it was, like I said, the worst investment that I ever mad and we promptly stopped as soon as we saw that there was just nothing good coming from these. But thank goodness back in November of 2016. It was released as an ad format that you could access within Campaign Manager. And as soon as they did that, they made it so it could only show up when someone was active, which is fantastic. They also lowered the price you could pay all the way down to I think I've seen as low as like 25 cents per person you send to. So those were the Message Ads. Then we got Conversation Ads back in March of 2020, when it was released on Campaign Manager as well. We were part of the beta. It's a really good ad format. But it suffers from a lot of the same issues that message ads do. And one of the things that I always talk about when I talk about this ad format is how these are the most expensive ads on LinkedIn. And a lot of people are shocked when they hear me say that because they think that it's one of LinkedIn's cheapest ad formats. So here's the logic around it. So an average cost per send of one of these ads might be somewhere if it's in North America between about 50 cents to $1 per send. So say for example that you sent these messages to 1000 people, that means that you'll be paying between $500 to $1,000 in total. And in this case, the average open rate is about 55%. So of those 1000 messages that you sent, you can expect about 550 opens. Now an average click through rate on these ads is around 3.2% And that's for message ads. Conversation Ads, it's significantly higher. But at 3.2%, that would result in about 17.6 clicks. So all of this calculates out if you do that division of 17.6 clicks with your $1,000 in spend, you come out to a whopping cost per click of between $28 and $57. It's pretty wild. That is per click, that is not per conversion. I will say though, don't let the possibility of the high costs dissuade you from using Sponsored Messaging because with the right offer, and it does have to be the right offer, that is the key here, you can drastically reduce those costs to the point where this ad type can even be more effective than sponsored content, or any of the others. For instance, we had a client who instead of getting the normal 55%, open rate, they were getting an 80% open rate, and instead of the 3.2% click through rate average, they were getting a click through rate of about 20%. And that means we were getting costs per click in between about $3 to $6. All just depending on how much you were paying per send. And of course, for sponsored content, most of the time we would kill to get costs that low. And that's why these ad formats are so special. If you have the right offer. If you don't know what I mean by offers, go back and listen to episode 10. We've linked to it below in the show notes as well. It's all about offers. But here's what you need to keep in mind for these message ad offers. It has to feel very much like a personal invitation is how I like to think of it. The reason why is when you send one of these ads, it's going to look like it came from a person. And it shows up as a message rather than just a banner ad, which feels a lot more invasive if it's spammy. But if it's not spammy, it feels a lot more personal and inviting. If you're gonna send one of these and just say like, click here to talk to our sales rep, or click here to sign up for our webinar. And these are to cold audiences, chances are these are going to be the most expensive clicks you've paid for on the network. It's not going to turn out well in your favor. If however, your offer is really good at either fluffing their ego with something like because of who you are in the industry, we want to offer you a sneak peek or early access to something that your peers are going to be jealous of. Or maybe it's an invite to an in person swanky event where you're going to get to rub shoulders, with important people in the industry just like you there's going to be hors d'oeuvres and drink served and all that, that works really, really well here as well. We've also found these to work quite well for hiring. You can essentially send someone a message that says, here's what we're looking for, you look pretty qualified, are you interested in applying, and we can get people to show interest that way. We've also found some recent success with offering something like a gift card in exchange for someone being willing to take a demo. So that's pretty cool, too. Hopefully, these types of ideas are getting your brain spinning. So you can be thinking about ways that you can utilize this. New offers you could come up with that feels special enough to be sent out through a Message Ad or a Conversation Ad. Some of the times that we've seen these ad formats work out really well. We of course had the one client I was telling you about the head 80% open rates and 20% click through rates. That was for an in person event that worked really well. We've worked with many of the largest hiring services on LinkedIn. And we also had a client who was offering a gift card through Conversation Ads that ended up converting really well. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break. And then we'll dive into the differences between Message Ads and Conversation Ads. 8:41 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you, B2Linked is the partner you'll want to work with. We've spent over $150 million on LinkedIn Ads, and no one outperforms us on getting you the lowest cost per lead at the most scale. We are, of course, official LinkedIn partners, and you'll deal only with LinkedIn Ads experts from day one. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to chat about your campaign and we would absolutely love to work with you. 9:19 Alright, let's jump into the differences then between these two ad formats that you get underneath the Sponsored Messaging umbrella. So first off, you have Message Ads, which is like getting an InMail message from a person and it'll say promoted or sponsored. It's a single message. It has both a headline and a body. But it doesn't work exactly like an InMail message would because the person can't actually send a reply back. The reply is all grayed out. It's basically like, click on one of these options that I'm giving you and if not, there's nothing else you can do and they just click on the next message. Conversation Ads, on the other hand, is very, very different. We talked about them being a choose your own adventure are more like a chatbot experience. They are quite similar, they show up in your InMail the same way, but they don't have a subject line. Instead, it's just the body copy opens immediately to multiple calls to action that you can thread together like a conversation. And then recipients can interact by selecting calls to action that you've put together. And then they receive an automated message back along with an additional call to action that they might want to select. The way you could think of this is like, let's say there's a big trade show going on in your industry, you can send out a Conversation Ad asking someone, are you going to be at this big trade show next week or next month? And if they say, yes, you could say great, come by our booth, we'll give you swag, and we'll treat you really special. Or if they say no, you can say well click here to get on our list for when we come back, we're going to be teaching a webinar all about everything we learned at this show this year, and about how the industry is changing and all that. So you can see how depending on someone's response, you can give them a different pathway that they might be interested in responding to. And we have found conversation ads to be about 30% more efficient than Message Ads. And I would chalk that up to basically a Message Ad, if you're not interested in the one thing that's being offered, you just shut it off, and you just move on to the next message. But a Conversation Ad, there are multiple chances to convert there. And the chances are a lot higher that you're going to find one or two that are actually interesting to this prospect. And so you'll end up with about 30% more conversions, which is great. That being said, they do take a lot more time to build. So keep that in mind, it's a lot harder to actually build those ads, but they do perform well. I mentioned at the beginning about how some people think that these are some of LinkedIn's cheapest ads. And the reason for that is definitely fixable. And I really wish LinkedIn would fix it. When you're inside of your Campaign Manager dashboard. And you're looking at one of these campaigns, the columns that you're used to looking at like average CTR and average CPC, these metrics are just going to be straight up wrong. And the reason why is campaign manager calls it a click when someone opens one of these ads. But I have a very different opinion on what a click actually is. In my mind, a click means that a prospect should be then presented with an opportunity to convert. But according to LinkedIn's definition of a click being an open, you can't convert right from there, you have to do one extra step. So here's what you want to keep in mind, you're looking at campaign manager, you see average click through rate and you think, Oh, this says 65% click through rate. That's amazing. Well, that actually is pretty good, but that's only your open rate. That means of all the people you send it to 63% clicked to open it. Now what we don't know, we don't know how many people click open, just to market is read so it's not standing out in their inbox as a message that needs to be read. So I don't necessarily think that an open is a high vote of confidence of whether something had a good headline or good initial like hook. You also look over and see average cost per click is 57 cents. Well, that is not what it is per click, that's your cost per open. So if under columns, if you move away from performance, which is probably defaulted to, and moved to Sponsored Messaging, some of the metrics in here are still wrong. If you scroll all the way over to the right, average CPC is still says the exact same thing as cost per open. But you will notice that there's a column there called sponsored messaging clicks. This is your actual clicks, when someone clicked on one of the calls to action that you put inside of your Sponsored Messaging Ad, you'll see your open rate was also called click through rate for before, but now this is the proper definition for it. And then you'll also see a column for click to open rate. That is your actual click through rate. That is the Sponsored Messaging clicks over the number of opens. So basically, if you're using this ad format, make sure that you are looking at it through the columns sponsored messaging, rather than just ad performance, because otherwise it'll throw you off. I've had so many people tell me that, oh, we're using these sponsored messaging ads, and we're getting like $1 cost per click, and they're way outperforming everything else, then we dive in and find out like as soon as we can see that their cost per conversion is significantly higher than any other ad format. And they realize, Oh man, I got tricked. My cost per click was actually $25 to $50 rather than $1. And we as advertisers should know this better. And I do think that LinkedIn should do a much better job of educating that and make it very, very clear for us. If you end up exporting this data. When you pull it out into Excel, you'll notice the column AO is called clicks Sponsored Messaging. And that's when generating a campaign level report. That's the one you'll want to use in all of your calculations for a click. Now, these are a very special kind of ad format, because they have incredible capabilities. The first one is that you can use what LinkedIn calls macros, or dynamic fields. That means inside of your message, you can insert dynamically, someone's first name, their last name, their company name, their industry, or their job title. So imagine you had a message like hi, first name, I see work at company name, we found other people with job title have found this really interesting, we thought you'd want to take a look. Something special to note is this is one of the ad formats that is eligible to be used in conjunction with LinkedIn lead gen forms, and we would highly recommend it. Because the cost on these are so high, you definitely want your conversion rates to be as high as possible while you're evaluating them. So you can make sure that it's it's going to be an ad format that works well for you, there isn't a way to preview these ads as you're writing them. So what you do is you can send a test message as you're crafting it. And that way, while the message is still in draft, it'll send directly to your LinkedIn account. And you can go look in your own messaging box to see exactly how it looks. I mentioned that it comes from an individual, if you work with your LinkedIn rep, they can turn on the ability for it to come from your company page instead. But I highly, highly want to discourage you from doing this. When it comes from a person, it generally gets a much higher open and conversion rate. When it comes from a company, it definitely feels like an ad. Something else special about these is that it will allow you to create a 300 by 250 pixel banner image that it says it's optional, but I would not call it optional. This is ad inventory that when someone is on desktop, and they open up your message, you get a free ad that accompanies your conversation ad. I think this is huge. Don't bypass this just because you think oh, I don't have the creative, it's worth it, go into Canva, create a quick 300 by 250 pixel image and be done. Imagine what this would look like if you sent someone a personal message. And then an ad for your top competitor happened to show up on the page at the same time, it's not a good look, you will notice that there are some limitations along with these ad formats. The most noticeable one is that there is a tight frequency cap. And this frequency cap is a person on LinkedIn can only receive one of these ads every 30 days. It used to be every 60 days, then they lowered it down to 45. Now it's 30. I wouldn't be surprised to see LinkedIn open this up to being once every 15 days in the future. But for right now, it's still one every 30. And that's not one from you every 30 days, that's one of these period. So no one else can send someone one of these, you've essentially monopolized their inbox for the whole month, which is kind of a cool feature. LinkedIn says that they do this frequency cap because they really care about their member experience. And they feel like if they sent any more than this, they would get annoying. But that seems really silly to me. Considering that people on LinkedIn who are popular, who are in high positions, they end up getting Sales Navigator InMails, like three, four or five a day, some of you may be getting considerably more than that. So one of these every 30, I don't think people can even tell that which ones are sponsored, versus which ones are sent by someone with Sales Navigator just trying to spam their inbox. A big downside here is that when someone sends you a Sales Navigator InMail, it actually sends a copy of that InMail to your email as a notification so that you can click to open it right there. But when you send one of these as a sponsored message, LinkedIn is not going to send an email to notify them, it'll just appear in their box when they're logged in. If you are a large advertiser, these are very hard to budget for because that inventory is unpredictable. You might run for three or four days with a large budget and say, Oh, this doesn't make sense at all, we're not spending anything that we want to. And then all of a sudden, a whole bunch of your inventory opens up from people who haven't received one of these in 30 days. Now they're open. And then in one day you spend 17 grand, that actually happened to us. So make sure when you use these, you're probably going to want to use them for a month or more just to make sure that you're taking advantage of all of your audience who may have already received one of these before and they're going to open up sometime during your campaign where you can send them. As you go to evaluate these, realize that there's going to be a lag in performance because oftentimes people will receive the messages and end up opening or clicking on them. days or even weeks after the initial send. So you don't want to run this for two days, look at the performance and say, Oh, this obviously isn't gonna work for us, because it still could. Give it some days for those sends to mature into opens and clicks. Unfortunately, these don't have any sort of retargeting that you can do, except for just lead gen form opens, I really wish we had the ability to exclude someone who had received multiple of your sponsored message ads without opening them or without clicking. I hope we get this kind of functionality in the future. We mentioned that you can't really respond to these, but if you are sending these in mass, there are going to be people who want to respond to you and want to get in touch and have a real conversation. So tell the person whoever this is coming from their account, that they might expect additional people sending connection requests, sending InMails, and maybe otherwise trying to get in touch. And here are the specs for these. So first off, we have Message Ads, where the name of your ad, because you can of course name most ads on LinkedIn, you get 255 characters there. You get to select from any sender that you've gotten permission to send from their account. Your subject line gets 60 characters, but it's truncated on mobile so I would suggest going shorter than that, if you can. The text section will let you have up to 1500 characters here. But again, if it's a giant wall of text that's daunting to read, chances are people are going to just move on to the next message. So I would recommend keeping these really shortened to the point. You can put links, you can put a main call to action that's up to 20 characters. You can put hyperlinks inside of your actual text, and you can't insert anything like video or other types of media. I would absolutely love it if we could put like animated GIFs and embedded audio into these, hopefully in the future. Then we have Conversation Ads, and again, these have names that are up to 255 characters, the same options with adding senders and having that 350 by 250 pixel banner image. Your intro message is shorter, it can only be up to 500 characters, then it will show your calls to action and each one of those can be up to 25 characters. You can have up to five buttons per message. So what I want you to take away from this episode is I want you to understand that these are ad formats where if you have a special, a VIP, a personal invitation kind of offer, then these are the right ad formats for you. If you don't, they're probably going to be too expensive so I would still recommend test out your offers on Sponsored Content first, maybe even text ads and dynamic ads, and come and test into Sponsored Messaging when you have an offer that you feel like could work really well. All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up so stick around 23:06 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. Okay, here are the episode resources. First of all, if you go down into the show notes, you'll see a link to the announcement about the left hand navigation being reverted. So you can go and read LinkedIn's whole answer in their help section. Also, check out our episode on offers, episode 10 if you haven't already. It's one of our tried and true episodes, it's definitely one you're going to want in your toolbox. If you or anyone you know, is looking to learn LinkedIn Ads, definitely point them towards the link that we have down below for the course on LinkedIn Ads. This is one that I did with LinkedIn Learning. It's about an hour and a half long and it is by far the highest quality and the lowest cost that you'll have for a LinkedIn training. Look down at whatever podcast player you're using and hit subscribe if you haven't already. Please do rate the podcast on whatever player you're using. Please, please, please, and I mean you, please go and review the podcast if you like what you're hearing. People reach out to me all the time saying that they love the show, but I'm not saying the reviews come in and that will help more than you know. So please, please, please, I'm begging, leave a review. With any comments suggestions, questions for us about the show, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Data Studio dashboard that Anna Shutko and AJ created together @AnnaShutko on twitter Marketing Analytics Show LinkedIN: Send DM and posting NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.   Show Transcript Have you heard of Supermetrics? If you're a LinkedIn advertiser, it's your new best friend. We're covering the capabilities 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. So we're highlighting another tool today in the LinkedIn advertisers arsenal. We're discussing a tool that I've been using now for years. It's absolutely indispensable for our team, because we're managing so many different accounts. And we're dealing with so much data. That tool is called Super metrics. And it's a very simple way of getting all of your ads data into a spreadsheet, or visualization tool for better reporting and analysis. I'm excited to welcome Anna Shutko from Supermetrics to answer my questions, and give you the inside scoop on what's coming. Anna and I go way back. And we've even collaborated on a free dashboard for LinkedIn advertisers, that you'll all get here in the show notes and I think you'll enjoy it. Without further ado, let's jump into the interview. Okay, I'm really excited here to have Anna Shutko from Supermetrics. She is the Brand Strategist at Supermetrics. She's also host of the awesome podcast, The Marketing Analytics Show, make sure you go and subscribe to that right now,if you're not already. She is based in Helsinki, Finland. And she was number seven on the Supermetrics team. She has been there over five and a half years she is one of the OGs for sure. She's also an avid cyclist and skier. Anna, I'm so excited to have you on the show. We've been friends for a long time. Thanks so much for joining us. Anna Shutko 1:42 I know, right?! Thank you so so much for having me. I'm super excited to be on the show. AJ Wilcox 1:49 I'm just as excited to have you I have so many great questions for you. Well, I'm the host. And so if I say that they're great, it's a little bit biased, but didn't really have some questions I think are gonna be really good for you. And for those of us who are listening, tell us anything about yourself that you want anything I may not have covered in your intro. Anna Shutko 2:05 Yeah, sure. So I think you nailed my bio. So I did a piece of furniture with Supermetrics. As I like to joke about it. I've been at the company for quite a while now more than five years. Wow. It's crazy when you think about it. So what people usually find interesting because I sometimes go in client calls and then when my colleagues introduce me, they're like, yeah, she's been here with us for such a long time. And people who knows Supermetrics are very, very surprised, because I guess not so many people like me have been with the company for a long time. We were a tiny team back then. Now we've grown fantastically. And we've grown so fast. Now we're over 250 people. It's crazy. So yeah, it's been a wild ride. And yeah, like I said, I've been moving between different areas of marketing between different departments. So I started as a growth marketer, then I went on to become a product marketing manager. I was also product manager, I was managing the relays and different connectors. And then I moved on to brand marketing. And now I'm super excited about my new role. So I'm building the brand measurement system, and I'm pretty sure we're gonna hear more about it. But yeah, that's a little bit about me. So many different areas. It's super exciting to see the company grow. It's super exciting to change all these different roles and learn more about connectors, including or favorite LinkedIn connectors. So that's a bit of a thing. AJ Wilcox 3:39 Oh, beautiful. And I am a fan of the LinkedIn connectors for sure. So thank you for your great work on those. Let's go ahead and start in here on the first question. So for those who are not already familiar with Supermetrics, what are the challenges that Supermetrics solve. Why is Supermetrics originally in business? Anna Shutko 3:58 Yeah, definitely. So Supermetrics essentially, is a data pipeline tool, as I like to call it. So we transfer data from a variety of different data sources or connectors, how we call them interchangeably. And these are LinkedIn Ads, Facebook Ads, Google Analytics, HubSpot, e-commerce platforms like Shopify. We cover over 80 different platforms. And like I said, literally any most popular and big marketing platform, you name it. And we transfer all this data to set up different data destinations. So we have sub categorized them into spreadsheets. So these are your Google Sheets and your Excel. Then there are different data visualization tools like Google Data Studio, or Power BI, Tableau, so data analytics/data visualization tools. And the third group is our data warehousing clusters. So we transfer data to different data warehouses like Azure, Google BigQuery, etc., etc., etc., And data links so you can combine your all your data in one place and store it securely. So that's a little bit about Supermetrics. So because we cover a lot of data destinations, and we connect to many different platforms and transfer the data, we cover a variety of different scenarios here. And this is actually historically has been the challenging part within product marketing, which also makes it very, very interesting that because we have so many products, we can help you cover multiple scenarios of what you want to do with your data. So you can have your reporting and dashboarding. So these are your client facing reports for agencies. And if you're an in house marketer, you can create your so called boss pacing reports, you have to create within your team. So these can be done in tools like Google Sheets, there are lots of writers who take advantage of Google Sheets and Excel and the formulas they can create there. And also, of course, do the visualization tools like Google Data Studio, super easy to add connectors there, it's super easy to create beautiful reports there and share them with your team. Then there are some cases of ad hoc analyses. And these are usually related to the questions you need to answer right now. So for example, why is my LinkedIn Ad spend so high and I have not seen the results? Or why does target audience A perform better than target audience B? So if you have this question and you really want to quickly acquire your data to answer the specific question, Supermetrics for Google Sheets can be a really good tool because we have the sideboard technology where you can select the metrics and dimensions you want to pick, and then it will pull the data into the spreadsheet, so that you can quickly answer very pressing questions. And another use case we have is the data warehousing use case where you can tie data across multiple different sources. So instead of just looking at one or two, or three or five data sources, you can create really complex models. But in order to create these models, you need to store your data in one place in order to join all this data. So here, you can pull all the data into your Google big query and then visualize it with a helpful view. But you can also perform the necessary data transformations within this data warehouse. So for example, you can compare the performance of your ad networks such as Google versus Facebook, again, you can segment and test different audiences, you can join data in the way you want to see sequel. And also you can report on the whole user journey. So for example, your clients started by clicking on your LinkedIn ads campaign, and they went to your website. And then you capture their website behavior with Google Analytics, maybe some of this data is coming from your CRM. And then with the help of a data warehouse, you can store all these data and then inquiry to connect the pieces together and see the whole user journey. So here are our most popular use cases. AJ Wilcox 8:20 Okay, so just out of curiosity for being able to track the whole buyer journey. What sort of software or tools do you need in place in order to I guess, get that journey across all the different platforms? Is that requiring that they're in a CRM or something that's already natively tracking all of that? Anna Shutko 8:36 Yeah, so usually depends on the company. Some companies might not necessarily have the budget or the need for a CRM. Of course, having a CRM is ideal. So if you have something like HubSpot, or it's Salesforce, it's really, really good also because their API's are so robust. They allow you to create custom dimensions and custom metrics to track your unique use cases. So for example, your users have, like I said, clicked on your LinkedIn Ads, and then they land on a website. And then they have to fill in a form. And the form might be somewhere, like on a different website, maybe it's an event and you're hosting a registration on Eventbrite, say for example. So when they put their data into Eventbrite or somewhere else, you also need to somehow capture this data within your CRM. So an alternative solution here could be to build a web page there where they would fill all their details. And then you can store all this data within the server ad. And then at the same time, you can combine it with the data coming from LinkedIn Ads. So it really depends. I would recommend starting with a combination of like ad networks, and reporting on that data and then combining it with data from Google Analytics. This can be the easiest when you're using a CRM, but at the same time, you can already start seeing a better overview of your user journey, and then connect to your CRM and then build on top these custom goals and metrics to create more of a reporting system. AJ Wilcox 10:16 Very cool. This is a topic that's been really top of mind for me, as I'm thinking about, as cookie apocalypse continues, and we losing our dependence on third party cookies. How effective are we as marketers going to be being able to track someone across the whole user journey when we know that, that cookies disappearing? This is fascinating to me So thanks for helping us out with that. So those are the problems that Supermetrics solves. Why is Supermetrics in such a good position to solve this problem? Why not, you know, Google themselves, just replace you with having a simple tool that just spits out their data. Same thing with LinkedIn? Like, why is Supermetrics solving this problem and not anyone else? Anna Shutko 10:57 Yeah, that's definitely a really, really good question. I can talk about this for hours. But we only have a limited amount of time, I guess. So first of all, Google is one of our partners. So Google, of course, is a massive, massive company and they have an amazing set of tools, but they are not the whole ecosystem. So there are lots of other players like Facebook, like LinkedIn, like Twitter, like HubSpot. And they also provide a set of really, really good API's, which allow you to export the data on the campaigns that are run. So super metrics, like mentioned, helps combine all this data and then we push this data to a number of different destinations. These are not just Google Sheets, these are Excel, for example. So for example, if your company is using Microsoft and you are required to use the office space, then Supermetrics can be a real really good tool because we can help push this data to your Excel desktop, say you set up your inquiries, and then you go offline completely. And then you can analyze your data using Excel. So like I said, we don't only connect to Google platforms. We help connect different players within the ecosystem together. And another good example is our Data Studio product. So Google Data Studio is a free data visualization tool for those of you who do not know. And they have native integrations with Google Analytics, Google Ads and other Google platforms, that is true. But for example, many marketers use Supermetrics to get data from Facebook or LinkedIn to the same data visualization tool. And if you're running ads on multiple different platforms, it would be a little bit silly to just analyze your Google Ads data without analyzing what you're doing on your LinkedIn as a platform, kind of like together. So we help marketers gain a very holistic view of their performance in the tools they already know, in the tools they already can use in the tools they already know how to use. So for example, if you know how to use Google Sheets, you can just install Supermetrics add on. And then you can continue using your favorite tool without this learning curve without the need to learn a new tool, and just query the data from the platform you want, say LinkedIn Ads, and just create the reports there. Or you can use these tools in combination. So we have a native Data Studio connector for our required products, for example, you've combined the data from multiple different sources in your inquiry project, and then you want to visualize this data. So you can use our Data Studio connector to do this. And the names of metrics and dimensions will have clear descriptions to to be very easy for you to understand what kind of metric you're visualizing, and how you can create a better report using all these tools together. AJ Wilcox 13:54 Oh, I like it. Alright, thanks for sharing that. I definitely think I'm of the same opinion you are that any of the other networks or channels could easily come out with a product that allows easier access to the data they have. But the Supermetrics advantage here is just being able to aggregate from all of these different connectors, regardless of whether or not any of them come out with an easier way for us to do it ourselves. Tell us about your relationship with LinkedIn, as well as the other platforms. What do you get from that partnership? How long have you been partners, that kind of thing? Anna Shutko 14:26 Yeah, sure, definitely. So with LinkedIn, we've been partners for quite some time. And there are many, many marketers, 1000s of marketers, is what we're talking about that reported their LinkedIn Ads. And then concrete budget pacing reports with Supermetrics. So we've recently demoed our product to your team. And like I said, we have really, really good and close collaboration there. And in addition to LinkedIn, we partner with Stack Adapt, HubSpot, Google, like I mentioned, AdRoll and many, many other data source and data destination companies. So when we partner with a company, we try to create the best possible value for the end user, of course. So we love creating templates for Data Studio especially. We've created some with the HubSpot. So we sit together with their product managers and think, Okay, what kind of metrics would be great to visualize for users. And we create completely free reporting templates with all the needed metrics and dimensions that our user can use as they are, or they can just take them as a blueprint for their own reports, they can tweak the metrics, they can tweak dimensions they can do that they want. And it's really amazing to partner with these companies, because we can combine the best of both both worlds so to say, so we have the reporting and analytics and data consolidation expertise, and the platform's bring their own know how, their knowledge to the table. So AJ you and I created this really, really good LinkedIn Ads dashboard. And this is one very good example of how your know how or some platform managers know how can be combined with Supermetrics know how. AJ Wilcox 16:20 Which is beautiful, we are going to link to that dashboard down below in the show notes so everyone can get access to it. But, Anna I'm so glad you brought this up. Because this has been a couple years ago, or a few years ago now. But we worked for about six months, I think on creating this dashboard, we call it the ultimate LinkedIn Ads dashboard. It's in Data Studio, it's totally free, like you mentioned, and anyone out there can go and get really complex analysis of their LinkedIn Ads. And that was because of you and I working so hard on that. I'm a big fan, I hope everyone goes and grabs that. Just to make it clear as to what Supermetrics is doing for LinkedIn advertisers. I mean, it's it's cool that you guys aggregate all of the different data and channels together into one spot. I think marketers who are responsible for more than one channel would love that. But for LinkedIn, specifically, you advertisers who are listening, you know how hard it is to get data out of LinkedIn. If every time you want to do a report, you have to go and click the export feature inside of campaign manager, and then put it into Excel, and then you know, do whatever formatting changes, you need to do, create pivot tables, then all of a sudden, all of that data is it's a snapshot of it, you can't do anything else with it. And so the next time your boss asks for a report, you're going and doing it again. What Supermetrics does is it will take, even on a schedule, this is my favorite part about it, you can say I want this data going into Excel or into Google Sheets, and I want it every day at 2am. I want it to go pull the next day's data. And then it's always there any report any pivot table that you build, all you have to do is just refresh. And now you'd never have to build that same report ever again. So, so cool. We'll talk about more of my favorite features of Supermetrics here a little bit later. But I just wanted everyone to know like, this is why it's so valuable for you. This is why I'm doing this tool spotlight on Supermetrics. Because there just is no other way to do with LinkedIn, what Supermetrics does. So I want to hear from you. What are the capabilities of Supermetrics, especially as it pertains to LinkedIn advertisers? Anna Shutko 18:28 Yeah, definitely. So I've mentioned a couple of capabilities. And like I said, because we have a product umbrella, it allows us to help customers solve multiple reporting and reporting related issues. So we have your ad hoc reporting, where we can acquire the data on the fly. And this is your Google Sheets, Excel products. We help with the data consolidation. These are your data warehousing products, building beautiful data visualizations, or you can have little exploration in Looker or Tableau or Power BI. Another really interesting thing I'd like to highlight here is that as you know, LinkedIn ads API constantly changes will always constantly change. LinkedIn is always coming up with new features. And he was right, you mentioned that it's challenging to export the data out of LinkedIn Ads. And this is something we're really help with, but it will also help you export this data in the right format. And we can help you create reports with really, really high data granularity. So what it means in practice is that you can test and report on many different pieces of a LinkedIn Ads campaign audiences. You have your campaign types, creatives, objectives, and you can break down your campaign into different pieces, pass these pieces individually or perform an AB test, and then make really, really smart optimizations. So this is one thing that I really, really like and would like to highlight here. And typically, we help achieve this with our Google Sheets product. And one very precise example is, again, the dashboard AJ and I have built. Belt. So you can report on not one, but four different types of spend. So there are formulas that help you calculate your total spend, projected spend, goal spend, as in the amount of you have to spend without under over spending. And then the cumulative spend to something you've spent overall. And here, we've taken one metric, which is spend, and then your budget goal, and then transformed into four different kinds of spend. And this brings me to my earlier point about data granularity, you can report on really granular data. So you can break down your spend by day, you know, Google Sheet, then create these calculations to have these four different types of spends. And then think about it holistically for not one, but four different viewpoints. And then create your budget pacer that can help you allocate budgets. Because LinkedIn Ads is a very costly platform, as we all know. So having these different types of spend calculating these different types of spend is really, really helpful. And the same thing goes with audiences and can campaign types. You can break all these spend down by multiple different dimensions, like what kind of audience brings the best ROI, what kind of campaign type performs better than the other campaign types. What kind of creative helps me get more clicks? So you can get really, really nerdy with your data. And this is something I really, really love. And another beautiful thing is that you can then combine this data. So if you don't want to look at it in a very granular way, you can also combine all this data in Google Data Studio report. And again, this is something that we've tried and tested, and it worked. So after you've analyzed all these types of spend, you can push them into the to see the dashboard to see bigger trends. So for example, you've noticed that your projected spend during this month is higher than your projected spend over the last couple of months. And you can start thinking, why you can understand what might be like bigger drivers behind this change. And in addition to this, you can add all different types of other data. For example, you can add your data on AB testing to see which campaigns have performed better historically. Or you can even add your data from LinkedIn Pages. Because if you use LinkedIn Ads and LinkedIn Pages in combination with can be a very, very powerful duo. It can help you uncover many sides on your audience. So there are a lot of different ways in which Supermetrics can help you slice and dice your LinkedIn Ads data. But also create really, really good reports that can help you get a general overview. AJ Wilcox 23:02 I love this, there's no data that you can get from campaign manager that you can't get within Supermetrics. And you own the data, you get to do whatever you want with it. So just like what Anna was talking about, with the ability to break down your spend by ad type and by audience, all these things are fantastic. But then you realize you could have a Google sheet or a page in your Data Studio dashboard that allows you to see the AB tests you're running, and another page that might show you just your budget, like what Anna was talking about. And another one that could be just your metrics at a glance like, hey, how are my general click through rates, or my general conversion rates, all of this you can do, it's super easy. And just in the dashboard that Anna and I built for you here a couple years ago, all of that is like already set up for you. So very, very cool. Anything else you want to share about the capabilities that we should go over? Anna Shutko 23:58 Yeah, definitely. Also, we have real really nice use cases. There is a tab on our website where you can read more about what other clients are doing. And I know it's useful for a fact because our customer success managers have found it very useful. So you can also learn from other people and you can check what some other guys are doing with their Facebook Ads campaign and apply the same ideas to your LinkedIn Ads reporting, which I think is super super exciting, because understand and basically steal ideas in the best possible way. Understand how others are running their reports. Another really, really good feature is the automated way of reporting. For example, once you've set your LinkedIn Ads budget tracker in spreadsheet, you can say, hey, I want to update my data and if my spend increases, and if it crosses you know the threshold to XYZ amount, send me an email. There is literally no human error unless you set up the query correctly. So you can easily get the data you want, whenever you want. And you can also set up rules and get customized alerts whenever something goes wrong. So you don't need to monitor your ad campaign on a daily basis. You don't need to worry about this, you set the report once, and then you forget about it. And then you can think about creatives, audience testing, whatever you want, whatever is on your table. So that allows you to focus on more interesting problems, which has always been the case for me, for example, when I'm using Supermetrics, I noticed that every single time I'm able to automate something, I can use this time on something else, which is something more exciting. And also, you can report in your campaigns faster, which of course, is a great thing, since you save a lot of time and then can spend it on something else. And yeah, like I said, we help cover pretty much a variety of reporting use cases, we also have a template gallery. So you can check it out on Supermetrics.com. We have our Google Sheets template gallery, we have our Data Studio template gallery, and we're gonna link to the dashboard AJ and I created so you can see how you can visualize your LinkedIn Ads data. AJ Wilcox 26:17 Oh, I love it. Thanks for sharing those. So what are some of the results that your customers have seen for their LinkedIn Ads because they are using Supermetrics? Anna Shutko 26:26 Yeah, definitely. So first of all, they are seeing improved targeting. Like I mentioned, once are able to really select your data in a variety of different ways. You can dig deeper into it, and then understand what exactly is working and what exactly is not working. So imagine, if you're diagnosing a patient, and you have only one, two, or maybe tools, that's not really going to give you enough information into what's wrong. And a campaign cannot really tell you what's wrong about it. So once you have a whole tool set being maybe Supermetrics for Google Sheets, data warehousing, etc, etc. You can slice and dice your data in a variety of different ways. Now you can diagnose your patient much better. You can pinpoint exactly what's wrong, whether it's the campaign type, or the spend, or the audience, or maybe creative, or maybe something else. And then you can really, really understand how exactly we're going to go about this. So of course, all that leads to increase ROI, time saved, and improved communication. What we've seen within the teams, because instead of arguing, you know, oh, you've adjusted this spend in a wrong way, no we should have increased these bids, you have much more intelligent conversations. And hopefully your team dynamic improves, because you can just look at the numbers. And this is something we also use internally. We just pull up a dashboard, we just check the numbers and the numbers never lie, and then they tell you the direction you need to take. And we just go from there. So it's very, very cool to use data to your advantage. AJ Wilcox 28:16 Amen to that. And how much does Supermetrics cost for these advertisers who want to use it for their LinkedIn campaigns and haven't used it before? Anna Shutko 28:24 Yeah, definitely. So it really depends on the product. So I don't want to provide inaccurate information. So the best way to check it is to go to Supetmetrics.com and then check the data destinations you want to use. And then check how you want to report on your LinkedIn Ads campaigns. So the price for Google Sheets is of course different from the price you are going to have for your data warehouse. But if you need a custom solution, our sales team is of course happy to help you. So you can select not just LinkedIn Ads, but a variety of different connectors. And this is what I normally would recommend. So don't just pick LinkedIn Ads, you can pick Google Analytics, or LinkedIn Ads, and LinkedIn Pages, for example. You can combine these data with our ad data plus google analytics connector for our Google Data Studio destination. There is a massive combination, all different data sources and the different data destinations you can potentially have so the price of course depends on that. And also, the pricing is relatively simple. You know, it might not sound as simple when I'm trying to describe it. But once you pick your destination, once you pick your connectors, you just pick the number of your accounts and how often you want to refresh your data. But that's about it. Once you know all these factors, once you understand which one wants to go with, then it's pretty simple. AJ Wilcox 29:54 And it is really reasonably priced. I've been using the tool now for years. Absolutely love. That's why I'm doing a tool spotlight on Supermetrics when there are plenty of other LinkedIn tools that I'm probably not going to cover. So thanks for providing such an awesome tool at good pricing. All right, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive right back in the LinkedIn Speaker 4 30:13 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked. com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. AJ Wilcox 30:22 If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you, B2Linked is the partner agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $150 million on LinkedIn Ads, and no one outperforms us on getting you the lowest cost per lead and the utmost scale. We're official LinkedIn partners, and you'll deal only with LinkedIn Ads experts from day one. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to chat about your campaigns, and we'd absolutely love the opportunity to get to work with you. AJ Wilcox 30:51 Alright, let's jump right back into the interview. Let me ask you, we've talked a lot about the capabilities of the platform and the company. What's your favorite feature of Supermetrics? Like, you're obviously a marketer yourself and a dang good one? What is the most helpful aspect of it to you? Anna Shutko 31:06 Yeah, sure. So first of all, I really, really love that we collaborate with our data destination partners very closely. And that allows us to develop product which sits within a data destination so to say, in most cases. Not all our products need data destinations, but most do. And I'm talking about all our Google Data Studio we co developed together with Google's team, working very closely with their engineers. So you can go to Google Data Studio, you can create any kind of report with Supermetrics, without ever leaving Google Data Studio. And this is amazing. You don't have to go from one page to another page to the next page. You just go to your Data Studio, you select LinkedIn Ads as a connector, where you connect it to your dashboard. And that's it. You can basically query data and create beautiful reports. So the experience is very, very intuitive. It's very smooth. And same thing applies to our Excel and Google Sheet product. So we have a sidebar, where you can take metrics and dimensions you want to pull. And then some magic happens here and your data just appears within a spreadsheet. So the adoption is very, very fast. I remember when I first saw our Google Sheets product, I fell in love it it instant, and it happened more than five years ago. But it's still remember it because the experience was so good, even back then. And another really, really useful feature is perhaps the ability to pull data from and report on multiple accounts easily. So I'm not talking about data sources here. But accounts, for example, you are an agency, and you're running campaigns on 50,60, 70, 100, different LinkedIn Ads accounts. And you have a really, really big client. And then they have 70 accounts. And imagine connecting these accounts one by one to your dashboard would be a complete nightmare. With Supermetrics, you can just select them all at once or then pull them all into the same spreadsheet all into one database, to a one to one Data Studio report. And then with the drop down selection, you can just take which accounts you want to see date the data from and this data will appear. It's very, very, very helpful for our agency friends over there. And the same thing happens with all the other data sources. So Google's accounts and if you want to combine your LinkedIn Ads with Google Analytics data, it's very, very easy to report on. AJ Wilcox 33:55 Very nice, I'll tell you, I have several things that I absolutely love about Super metrics. I've played with a lot inside of Data Studio. And what I love is number one, it's fast. When you're in Data Studio, and you're using Supermetrics as your data source, the pages just load nearly instantly. It's super, super fast. It's also really easy to use, like I use LinkedIn API. And I know what that's like to be looking at these metrics on the back end that have a name, and you're going I don't know what that name is. Supermetrics calls them things like every column, every source, every metric, every KPI, they're all named in ways that even just a very, very basic marketer, like brand new to the industry could still understand what it was they were building. If you've ever tried to take data directly from LinkedIn. So you export it to a CSV, and then you try to put that into Data Studio. What you'll notice is the columns aren't of the right data types, and you have to keep going into your spreadsheet and making changes when you use Data Studio or Google Sheets, but especially Data Studio with the Supermetrics connector, everything already comes in and exactly the right data types, you're never going to have to worry about, oh, my dates aren't showing up because Excel didn't recognize it was a date. And then Data Studio didn't recognize that it was either, you never have to worry about that. Something else that I love, let's say you go into campaign manager, you do an export to CSV. And it's a, let's say, an ADS report or campaigns report, when you look at that column of like, click through rate or cost per click, as soon as you try to combine that or do some kind of like an average, those averages don't mean anything. If you try to do an average of a whole bunch of percentages, it will make some kind of an average, but it'll be wrong. And Supermetrics fixes all those like every time we export something with Supermetrics. All of the columns are accurate all the time in a way that they wouldn't be from LinkedIn directly. I'll also mention one more thing, which is there was a metric that I wanted to see inside of super metrics that I knew LinkedIn had access to it was a new one. And I mentioned something to you, Anna. And you said, Oh, let me message the engineering team. And I want to say it was within like, a couple hours, you've messaged me back and said, Hey, check it, we should have that data available now. And so it's fast, like Supermetrics is always on top of new changes. Anna Shutko 36:23 I think we should definitely hire you, AJ, if you're ready to move to Helsinki, just know, just let me know, I have a spot for you on the team. AJ Wilcox 36:32 I am very good in cold weather. So we should talk about it. Let me ask what's coming up in the future that you're super excited about with Supermetrics? Anna Shutko 36:40 Yeah, so there are so many things that are coming up. First of all, we have multiple new data warehousing destinations for all of you data nerds out there. So you can store your LinkedIn Ads data in more places. And also, we are always developing our data sources, and then pattern paths for now. So you can then combine this one connects data with a variety of data sources. And that's been on the product side. I am always very excited about the new product developments. But also, I'm very exciting about The Marketing Analytics Show. This is the podcast that I host. We're gonna interview really, really cool guest. You're going to hear more about the first party data. So something AJ and I briefly talked about at the beginning of this podcast, and how you can tag your data correctly before you cleanse your data warehouse, and many, many other cool topics. And every single time I talk to these guests on super, super excited because the share very interesting viewpoint about this industry. AJ Wilcox 37:52 I love it. I'm a subscriber of the podcast, make sure you all go back and listen to episode four, because yours truly was on there. Just kidding. You don't have to listen to that particular episode, go listen to something that you don't already know super well. If you're listening to the show, you probably get everything that we talked about. Something that you mentioned, that I think is so helpful is that if you're making all of your decisions, from the data that you get directly from LinkedIn, you will find that you're making the wrong decisions. What I mean by that is like the data you get from LinkedIn on things like even conversions, leads, means next to nothing, until you find out whether those are qualified leads, whether those leads are actually turning into sales. And so Anna, what you mentioned that is so cool is this direction of moving into the data warehousing solutions. So now you have access to what LinkedIn has. But then with other CRMs and other data partners and data warehouses, you're able to then combine that with the data that you can find only from your CRM, or other sources that can report to you on number of qualified leads and other elements of lead quality, how many proposals sent, closed deals, what the deal closed for, and you can actually report on what really matters. So that makes me really excited. So final question. This might be something you've already answered. But what are you most excited about either personally or professionally, yourself? Anna Shutko 39:15 Yeah, sure. I am excited about a few things in general. And like mentioned, there have been really, really exciting product developments at Supermetrics. But one thing I wanted to pinpoint is that right now I'm building the brand measurement system. And this is basically a series of data transformations and dashboards that help combine all the data about our brand and how it's performing. And I'd like to say we drink our own champagne, it's a Supermetrics. So of course, we're using Supermetrics to consolidate all this data. So it's really exciting to work in this project. And it's really exciting to see how our product works from the client perspective. And of course, whenever I'm ready, I'm happy to share all the insights and all the learnings. AJ Wilcox 40:09 Wonderful. Well, as you're coming out with that stuff, how can people follow you? How can people obviously I would say, make sure you subscribe to The Marketing Analytics Show. But how else can people find out this stuff as you're releasing it? Anna Shutko 40:21 Yeah, sure. So I am on Twitter. So it's @AnnaShutko on Twitter. And you can just follow me there. I promise you, I really promise that I will post more and I will post more updates on the podcast and insights that are learned after building this system. And another way to connect with me is to follow me on LinkedIn, you can connect with me there, you can send me a DM and I will also be posting some of the updates there. AJ Wilcox 40:54 Oh, I love it. Okay, we'll put all those links here in the show notes below. So make sure you do follow Anna, reach out to her if you have questions. Anna, thanks so much for coming on the show. I think it's very obvious that I'm a huge Supermetrics fan. I really just appreciate our collaboration in the past, and everything you've shared. Is there anything else that you want to share with us before we jump off? Anna Shutko 41:15 Yeah, sure. Thank you so much, AJ, for inviting me, it was a very, very interesting conversation, great questions. And I love being interviewed by fellow podcast host. So one more thing before we leave. So I'll ask AJ to link the article we co-wrote in the show notes. So you can follow how exactly we came up with these four different types of spend you can monitor, and how you can report on AB test for your LinkedIn Ads campaign, there was a lot of good stuff there. So also, this article contains really practical instructions and how you can connect your LinkedIn Ads, and then create this superpower spreadsheet and then connect that spreadsheet to Data Studio dashboards so you can also use different charts and visualizations. So not only will you learn how to approach LinkedIn Ad spend reporting. You will also learn a bunch of different tools, hopefully. So check it out. I really hope you enjoy it. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to reach out to us. And I'm really, really happy to be part of this LinkedIn Ads community. AJ Wilcox 42:27 Wonderful. Well, thanks, Anna. I will definitely link to all of that. And just a big shout out to you everything that you're building is awesome for us marketers. So a huge thank you from the LinkedIn Ads community. Anna Shutko 42:37 Thank you so much. I'm so happy you are enjoying. AJ Wilcox 42:39 All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around Speaker 4 42:49 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more AJ Wilcox, take it away. AJ Wilcox 43:00 Okay, like we talked about during the show, I have the Data Studio dashboard that Anna Shutko and I created together. So check the link there in the show notes, you'll absolutely love that I'm sure. There's a killer template for budget tracking inside of Google Sheets, as well as the full Data Studio dashboard that we created together. You'll also see the link to Anna Shutko on Twitter, as well as her LinkedIn profile. So as she said, send her a DM, follow her, connect with her all that good stuff. She's also the host of The Marketing Analytics Show so you will see a link to that. Because all of you are podcast listeners, obviously, you'll definitely want to go check that out and get subscribed. Any of you who are looking to learn more about LinkedIn Ads, or maybe you have a colleague that you're training or something like that, check out the course that I did with LinkedIn on LinkedIn Learning. It's by far the least expensive and the best quality training out there and it's next to no dollars. It's pretty cheap compared to any other training. You'll enjoy it. Please do look down whatever podcast player you're listening on and make sure you hit that subscribe button. We'd love to have you back here next week. Also, please rate and review the podcast. Honestly, I say it way too much. But it really means a lot. It makes a difference to me. So please, please, please go leave us a review. We'd love that with any suggestions, questions, feedback, anything like that. Reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week, cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Analysis of Job Titles vs Functions Systematic Approach to LinkedIn Targeting Targeting Deep Dive NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.   Show Transcript LinkedIn only understands 55% of job titles. Wait, what? Really? What does that even mean? Well, we're dissecting how Job Title works on LinkedIn ads today on the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. So I put a post out about a month ago that mentioned a stat that I use, and quote quite regularly. I've said in the past, LinkedIn only understands 30% of job titles. And the post got a lot of engagement and several people question that stat. Where I got it from, not to mention the number of LinkedIn employees who've messaged me on the back end and said, Hey, AJ, where did you get that stat? I'm curious. And of course, no one's very disrespectful. No one's commenting, like AJ, you're a liar. That's bullcrap. But I wanted to walk you through my methodology of how I came up with that stat. And especially to inspire you guys all to do the same thing. I want everyone doing research to better understand how the platform works. Well, after being questioned on that stat, the 30% stat. I'm happy to report that we dug in and reran a bunch of research, and found that LinkedIn had actually improved, its targeting quite a bit in the last several years. So let's dive in now and explore. I think, first of all, what you need to understand is that job titles as a field on LinkedIn, are freeform, meaning that anyone can type whatever they want. You can come up with your own title, you can use a standard one that's been around for years. And LinkedIn, not to mention any other platform, really can't be held accountable for trying to understand every single weird and odd job title out there. I'm connected to a CEO whose job title used to be Chief Trashcan Emptier something cute like that. And of course, LinkedIn is going to look at that job title and say, I have no idea who that is or what they do. So what LinkedIn does is it takes a look at the job title and tries to categorize it in which job functions in which seniorities it should fit. And I would say for the most part, it does a pretty good job of categorizing these. And then they take it a step further, which I don't actually like all that much. There's this concept called super titles. And you won't know about LinkedIn having super titles, unless you have access to LinkedIn's ads API like we do, because it's one of the elements you'll see in the API. But basically, what they do is they'll take and group similar job titles together to roll up into one kind of a master job title. So when you go and put in the job title of Salesforce Administrator, you probably don't know this, but you're probably adding quite a few other job titles along with it. And we're really trusting LinkedIn, that they've done a good job of grouping these job titles together. And the problem is, you can't actually see anything about your super title and you can't see the other job titles that are being targeted underneath it. Like I said, most of the time, LinkedIn does a pretty dang good job of this. We have noticed a few weaknesses. The biggest weakness we've seen is, for some reason, the job title Marketing Specialist gets rolled up to Chief Marketing Officer. So we had a client where we were targeting CMOS, and we noticed that a lot of Marketing Specialists were coming through their forms. And so of course, we did the great agency thing, we went in, and we excluded the job title of Marketing Specialist. And then all of a sudden, the whole campaign was too small to run. We were targeting CMOS, specifically by job title and as soon as we excluded Marketing Specialists, boom, the whole audience went away. I definitely think that this is a bug, I think someone miscategorized that one job title. But I think it's fair to say this is probably not the only mistake that LinkedIn has made. And so you do have to be pretty careful when you're using job title targeting. And let me start by saying, I hope none of you get the idea that AJ hates job title targeting, because I certainly don't. I still use it a lot. And I still recommend that everyone else use it a lot, too. But the reason why I care so much about this is we need to understand how each type of targeting works so we can use that as a tool to help us optimize towards whatever our goal is. For one client, I might use only job title targeting. And another I might do 10% job title targeting and 90% job function targeting. And it just totally depends on a client's budget, and who their target audience is. If you go back and listen to episode two of this podcast, we talked about the systematic methodology for how we go about targeting an audience. I don't want you to misunderstand and think that what I'm telling you is job title targeting is weak and doesn't have a place and you shouldn't use it. I will say though, whenever we use it, we generally have other campaigns targeting the same persona through a different way that are meant to support that campaign. And, of course, we're going to analyze the day data afterwards to help us understand, you know, did Job Title outperform or underperform? Do we need to bid one of them up, one of them down? What can we learn about how we are targeting these people? So go back and listen to episode two to go way deep into that. And if you stick around till the end of the episode, I'm going to go over a couple of comments that we got on that post that I told you that had a lot of engagement with really good questions, really good input. And we'll answer those questions right here at the end. So make sure you stick around. And here's a quick sponsor break and then we'll get to dive into the methodology of the data collection. 5:33 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $150 million on LinkedIn Ads, and no one I mean, no one outperforms us on getting you the lowest cost per lead at the most scale. We're official LinkedIn partners, and you'll deal only with LinkedIn Ads experts from day one. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com and we'd love to chat with you about your campaigns. Alright, let's jump here into the methodology. We know that job function is by far the most broad way that we can target someone on LinkedIn. And sometimes we might have a job title, like my example of Salesforce Administrator that we can't target by job function. There's no job function for Salesforce Admins. And actually, I just checked they do they fit underneath the IT job function. Okay, that was interesting to know. So if job function is the most broad, and we want to test job titles, which we know is one of the most narrow, the best way I could think of to do this was to take job function and seniority, a combination of which has a really common job title associated with it. And then compare those audience sizes to the job title. So I'll give you an example. If we take Marketing Managers as the job title, that's a pretty standard job, that there should be a lot of people who have and if we take a look at the audience size associated with that, and compare it to the audience size of the job function of marketing, plus the seniority of manager. Ideally, if LinkedIn had a perfect understanding of all job titles, those would be the exact same audience size because they're essentially the same audience. So that was what I set out to go understand and prove. So as I review this data, it's important to understand that there's a lot of job titles that aren't directly aligned with a direct job function and seniority. So we can't compare, we won't have these insights. So what I wanted to do was compare all of the ones that we can see the ones that we can understand. And hopefully that gives us a good idea of maybe what we can expect for the ones that we can't see and can understand. For everyone to follow along. If you go down in the show notes below, you can click on a Google sheets link. And that will take you to the Google sheet where we put all of this research. And please let us know anything that you've improved. Or if you've taken this and started your own study or understanding somewhere else, please, we'd love to take part in the analysis with you. And also, if you can tell anything that we've missed or should be improved in our testing methodology, please speak up, let us know. So what we did is we took the top five job functions that are really standard that was Sales, Marketing, Finance, IT, and Operations. And we paired each of them with the seniority of Manager, Director, VP, and C-level, we went and collected their audience sizes, as well as their suggested bid ranges. And then we compare those against campaigns that we put together, where we just expressly targeted those job titles. So for instance, under Marketing Manager, there were things like Digital Marketing Manager and other types of Marketing Managers. And I went ahead and added them to the list to kind of buoy them up. In that particular list, I didn't include product marketing, so anything with product, I left it out, just so you understand. And you can see all the data there in that sheet. You can see those that LinkedIn understands the very least, and those that LinkedIn understands the very best. There are a couple of call outs that I've got for you on this one. For instance, VPs of Operations, LinkedIn only has 13.6% of them accounted for in job titles. I thought that was pretty interesting, because a VP of Ops should be a pretty standard job title. Then we have like an Operations Manager, which LinkedIn actually really understood quite well. It matched really high at 77.8%. So those were our highs and lows. And there were a couple really odd ones, for instance, Marketing Managers, the job function audience size on this one was only 360,000, but the job titles size was 640,000. And I'm pretty sure that's a weakness in LinkedIn job function targeting, because Marketing Directors have 490,000 and generally, there are more managers than there are directors. So I think the actual size on LinkedIn of Marketing Managers should be somewhere around the, like 900,000 or a million. But the targeting only showed me what it showed me so that was weird one for sure. Something similar happened with IT managers. There were only 480,000 IT Managers by job function. But when I combine them by job title, there were 630,000. So all in all, there were three where job function actually caught fewer of these people than job title. But for the most part, it worked as expected, and there were many more under job function than there were under job title. And when I combined all of the data for all five of these job functions, we came out with an average of 55%. Meaning that LinkedIn probably understands 55% of the job titles for these super standard job title positions. In my defense, because these are the ultras simple straightforward job functions and titles that means that the super not straightforward ones, like Marketing Ninja or Sales Expert, probably match at a much lower percentage. But at least with this methodology, I'm comfortable using the stat that LinkedIn understands about 55% of job titles. Now, when you go and look at this data, if you scroll over to the right, you'll notice that I collected the floor bid, the low recommended bid, the recommended bid, and the high bid for each of these audiences that we built on job function and on job title. And I started with job title, because it's usually the smallest and I subtracted the job function audience. So what you get here is any number that is positive, it means that the job title was more expensive, it had a higher either recommended or minimum bid than the job function campaign that it's associated with. And I did it this way because I expect that job titles are going to be more expensive because it's more targeted and because LinkedIn understands fewer of those job titles, and more people are bidding on them, they should be more competitive. And what we found is, on average, a job title's floor audience is 17 cents higher than the job function audience. When you look at the low recommended bid, though, it drops to job titles only being three cents more expensive on average. When you look at the recommended bid that drops to basically zero, meaning that a job function's recommended bid is usually a cent higher than the job title. And then when you get to the highest end of the bid range, on average job title is 12 cents cheaper. And I'll be honest, I don't have a whole lot of faith in the recommended bid ranges that LinkedIn provides, but if this is any sort of clue as to what the auction actually looks like, what the level of competition looks like, for each of these audiences, then that's really insightful to understand that Job Function is actually more expensive when you're bidding high and Job Titles are going to be less expensive when you're bidding low. So definitely go familiarize yourself with the data, get an understanding for it. And of course, please use it to start your own research and share with us what you find. So this conclusion that we came to have LinkedIn only understanding about 55% of job titles, that means that job titles are a pretty tight way of targeting. And that's why we like it, we're glad that there's a tight way of targeting because if we only had to target by job function and seniority, that would be way too wide, way too large of audiences and we love this ability to a super narrow target on something. And this is why it's also ultra important to utilize all of the different targeting types that LinkedIn gives us. Understand how all of them work so that you don't miss any audience members. And again, go back to episode two to learn about those targeting strategies. You can also look at Episode 11, to understand the various targeting options that there are to do a deep dive into how each of them work. And as a reminder, this shouldn't dissuade you from using job titles in your targeting, they still are very valuable. Okay, like I promised, here's a couple of the comments that we got on this post and I wanted to read to you and explain what was going on. So Kyle Reeves said, "I was told by a higher up LinkedIn team that they normalized job titles in order to include less common ones into a more common group as best they can. For example, a Marketing Ninja would be grouped in with Marketing Specialists." And Kyle That's exactly right. That's what we talked about with this super titles concept of how LinkedIn tries to roll up smaller titles into the larger. It's just kind of a black box. We can't see actually how LinkedIn handles this and so I would love a lot more visibility into that. Also Nuno Pereira mentioned, "Are you saying that if I target an audience of 1,000 VPS of Marketing by job title that LinkedIn will, on average, recognize only 300 of them, even if all of them have VPS of Marketing as their current job title on LinkedIn?" And Nuno, in theory, yes, but obviously if all 1000 of them actually put VP Marketing as their job title, LinkedIn is going to understand all of them. The problem is a whole bunch of them have put something other than that, or something in addition to that, who they might be a VP of Marketing in their full time position. But the way that LinkedIn is interpreting what they've said, their job title is, you might have actually 1,000 People who are all considered VPs of Marketing, but LinkedIn only categorizes, let's say, 55% of them. And actually, because I have this data, I can be a lot more exact here. For VPs of Marketing, LinkedIn understands 46.5% of them. So hopefully, that's helpful. All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around. 16:14 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. All right, as promised, here's our great resources. The very first link here is going to be the analysis of the job title versus job function, audience sizes that we did. It's a Google sheet where anyone with the link can view and definitely go check it out. Let us know any questions, thoughts, corrections, whatever you find. You'll also see the link there to the systematic approach to targeting episode that was episode two on the podcast, as well as the deep dive into the different targeting facets on LinkedIn. That was episode 11. If you or anyone that you know is trying to learn LinkedIn ads, point them towards this link. It's the LinkedIn Ads course that I did with LinkedIn, on the LinkedIn Learning platform. It's by far the cheapest and the most effective training course I've found out there. And whatever platform you're listening to this on right now, look down and hit that subscribe button if you've appreciated this. And please do rate and review. If you do leave a review, we'd love to give you a public shout out. Shoot us an email at Podcast@B2Linked.com with any thoughts, questions, suggestions, anything like that around the episode. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Ad Saturation Benchmarking your LinkedIn Ads performance How the LinkedIn Ad Auction works Performance Chart NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.   Show Transcript Click through rates on your LinkedIn Ads don't matter at all, and you shouldn't pay attention to them. Well, I've heard this argument and I totally disagree. We're talking about click through rates and why they matter on this week's LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there, LinkedIn Ads fanatics! My digital marketing beginnings were in Google ads. And for years, I would hear the argument about both click through rates and quality score. People saying they don't matter, you shouldn't focus your attention on them. Just don't pay attention at all. I've seen the same case made for LinkedIn Ads. But I'm here to tell you that click through rates are incredibly important on this platform. Sure, it's not something that you'll want to report to your boss or to your client, quite honestly, they're not going to care. But for you, as an ad manager, it's one of the strongest signals that you can use to spot problems in your account, as well as leverage to get better results. So let's hit it. First of all, what is click through rate? Well, the simple definition is it's your clicks divided by your impressions. So it becomes a percentage rate. And when you have nothing to compare it to, then it really doesn't mean anything. But if you've listened to Episode 15 of the podcast, if you haven't, feel free to go back and check it out, it's all about benchmarks. And when you have a benchmark to compare your results to, all of a sudden it becomes increasingly important. Plus, you can always compare to past performance, if this is a campaign that you've been running for some time. What I like about click through rate is it really is the easiest way to tell if your ads are interesting to your audience or not. And one of the arguments that I've heard is that your click through rate doesn't matter if you're paying by the click anyway. And sure all admit that. If you're paying by the click, and you're happy with the costs per click that you're getting, and you're spending all the budget that you won't really want to, then you really don't have to care too much about your click through rates. But as soon as you want to scale up and spend more, or if you decide that you want to optimize your efforts to either decrease costs, or improve your conversion rates, this becomes an entirely different story. So I'm here to tell you that your click through rate matters. And you shouldn't dismiss it just because it's front end data. Your click through rate really begins your data story. Of course, it is only the beginning. But hey, we all judge books by their covers, don't we? In order to tell the full story of why click through rates are so meaningful here on LinkedIn, we need to talk a little bit about relevancy scores. And the history here is that back in early days of Google Ads back when it was Google AdWords, they needed a way to prioritize which advertisers ads that they showed above another one. So let's say that you have two advertisers who are both bidding $3 for a click, the platform obviously wants to maximize its revenue and make Google more money. But when two advertisers are both willing to pay $3 for a click, then you really can't tell which one should be prioritized. So what they did is they started looking at click through rates. And if one advertiser had a 3% click through rate, and another had a 1% click through rate, they're both willing to pay $3 per click, but the one with the 3%, click through rate is going to make Google money the same money three times as often. So this became quality score. It's a metric that Google advertisers have had to care about for a long time. Well, it's a really good system. And of course, all of the modern ad platforms all incorporate this to some degree. For instance, on LinkedIn, it's called relevancy score. On Facebook, it's called relevance ccore. On Twitter, it's called quality adjusted bid. I have no idea why they chose that, but yeah, sure, it works. And the effect of what this does is for the platform, it maximizes the platform's revenue. They're going to make sure that those who are making the platform more money, get their ads served more often, and continue getting a boost, making them money. And for the advertisers, if you're doing a great job, if your ads get a lot of engagement from your audience, then it rewards you, you essentially get more impressions and more clicks at cheaper costs than a poorer performing competitor might. Conversely, it punishes advertisers who aren't profitable to the network. And if you're early to a platform, and there's just not much competition there, no worries. A bad advertiser can work for a while. But as soon as competition continues to rise, it'll eventually push bad advertisers out. And that's really what relevancy score, quality score, whatever you want to call it, does. It weights all the benefits to the advertisers who are doing great and punishes bad advertisers. Back when I was focused on Google ads, and this was early days, I know it's probably very, very different now, but back when I was working with it, there were 22 different factors that Google claimed went into its quality score. And it would be things like how often the ads get engaged with and clicked on, for sure, that's a big one. But they would also look at the landing page and decide how relevant it was. And they looked at page load times, and all of these different factors. And then you have the LinkedIn Ads platform that was developed back in 2007. And it had the same mechanism, but it was a lot more nascent, a lot more simple, which is actually good. I think it works in our advantage. I wouldn't be surprised if LinkedIn continues to update and make it more sophisticated in the future. But as of right now, it's still pretty simple. The way that you can calculate how LinkedIn figures out what your relevancy score should be, it's a combination of two elements. It's your historical click through rate. So how people have clicked on your ads in the past, combined with your current click through rate, how people are interacting with your ads right now. Is historical click through rate more important than current? That I don't know, what I do know is that historical is a strong enough element that on accounts where we've had a lot of spend and performance in history, it can be really difficult to dethrone the winning ad. And what that tells me is that one ad has such a high relevancy score, that it can't be dethroned with launching something newer. And the benefits to you to having a high relevancy score are absolutely obvious. It allows you to beat out your competition for impressions in the auction without having to bid as much. So think of it like this, you could be paying 20% less than your competitor for every single click, meaning that you're bringing in leads that are costing 20% less than your competitor. And who wouldn't want to make sure that they were paying 20%, less than a competitor had to pay for exactly the same thing. And all of this because of a silly little metric that you can't even see. And let me back up there, you actually can see it. But I'd argue that it's not ultra helpful. If you go into campaign manager and hit Export, and you generate a campaign performance report, you can scroll over until you see a column called quality score. And first of all, LinkedIn calls it relevancy score. So why in the world is Google's name for it quality score in our reporting, I don't know why. But I digress here. If I look there, and I see that a campaign has a relevancy score of four, and that's a scale out of 10. I know that that's bad. So I'm probably going to want to go into that campaign and make some kind of a change to see if what I did actually improves it. So I come and check back a couple days later. And my relevancy score still says four. So I checked back another week later, and it still says four. And what I want to impress on you is, if this were a metric that were updated every day, or on a regular schedule that we could predict, this would be really useful for us to optimize. We could see something bad or even good, make changes, and then see the results of it. So because we don't know how often this is updated, it really isn't all that useful to us as advertisers. It might be interesting to see, at some point, this campaign had a relevancy score of four or of seven, but it doesn't help us very much in optimization. So you're asking, well, AJ, if we don't use that metric, how can we actually tell how it is we're doing? Well, remember how I said that relevancy score was calculated by basically two different types of your click through rate. So what I recommend doing is go and compare your click through rates to benchmark. And again, Episode 15 of the podcast goes over all of benchmarks. You can basically use your click through rate as an analogy to what your relevancy score would be. So for instance, if you know that the average click through rate on sponsored content is something like .44%, and you're getting a 1.6% click through rate, you could look at that and say, ah, we are three, four times above benchmark that tells us something really, really good. We probably have a very high relevancy score, maybe it's a an eight, nine, ten, something like that. And don't get too caught up in your relevancy score, just realize that it's a mechanism that's there and it might help explain how performance changes or how the platform reacts to your test over time. And by itself, it doesn't mean anything. All it is is a multiplier that either helps or hurts you in the auction. And you should also remember that this is a comparative metric, which means if you have a relevancy score of 10, and your competitor also has a 10. Neither of you really get much of a benefit at all. But of course, you're both going to crush your competitors who have relevancy scores of three and four. So we've talked about how relevancy score gives you a multiplier or a weight in the auction. Let's talk about how the auction actually works on LinkedIn, and LinkedIn. actually released a really good video about a year ago on their YouTube channel about how the auction works, how your cost per click are calculated. So I've linked to that in the show notes. It's only about four minutes long and it's definitely worth your time to help you understand. But basically how it works is that your bid gets multiplied by your relevancy score in the auction to give you a combined score. And then what happens is your combined score, every time a possible impression, a piece of ad inventory opens up, there becomes a little auction in between you and your competitors or that audience. And they compare your combined score to that of your competitors. Whoever has the highest combined score, theoretically pays one cent more than whatever the second place person, the loser in that auction, would have paid. Now I say supposedly, because it sure doesn't seem like we only pay a cent more than what the loser pays. And we've done quite a bit of testing around this. We haven't seen this work, but we assume that what LinkedIn saying here is correct. And it is a second price auction, which is the same model as Google has. So one way that this might work for you is, let's say that you and a competitor are both bidding $10. If your ads have a higher click through rate, chances are you're gonna get shown more than they do. But let's turn the tables here a little bit. Let's say that you're bidding $6 and they're bidding $12. If your click through rate is double theirs, or even higher, it's in LinkedIn best interest to keep showing your ads, even though you're only bidding $6, you're not bidding very aggressively, and your competitor was willing to pay $12. But still, your click through rate was higher, and LinkedIn is gonna get paid more by showing you. So you're gonna end up even with non-competitive bids, getting shown more often at lower costs than really anyone else in the auction. So you can probably see now why we're talking about click through rate being so important, because your click through rate determines what your relevancy score is. And then that determines how much you pay and how much you get shown in LinkedIn's auction. And this is, of course, talking about if we're bidding by cost per click. But if you're using LinkedIn's either cost per impression bidding or automated delivery or max delivery, it changes the scales a little bit, when you're paying by the impression, LinkedIn looks at it and goes, hmm, well, we get paid either way just for showing this ad. So we don't have to worry too much about the auction or too much about relevancy score. So if you are having troubles getting your ads shown, a lot of times we'll either turn on auto bidding, or bid CPM. And it's a nice easy way to bypass the auction. With that being said, if your ads aren't getting clicked on, chances are they're costing you too much and there's a lot you can do to turn that around and actually get better engagement. All right, here's a quick sponsor break. And then we're going to dive into what click through rates do for you in ad optimization. 13:01 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you, B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $150 million on LinkedIn Ads, and no one outperforms us on getting you the lowest cost per lead and the most scale. We're official LinkedIn partners and you'll only deal with LinkedIn Ads experts from day one. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com. to chat about your campaigns. We'd absolutely love to work with you. Alright, let's jump into why click through rate matters in your ad optimization. Your click through rate really is a good measure of how attractive your ads are. It's really the first warning light of problems all the way down your ad funnel. If you have a bad click through rate, it could be that you wrote your ad copy in a non compelling way. Or maybe the image wasn't strong enough, or it didn't stand out enough to get people to stop scrolling and so they ended up just scrolling right past it. Or maybe people did see your ad, but your offer itself wasn't interesting enough for them to want to click. If I'm seeing high costs per click, and even high cost per lead. Click through rate is going to be the first thing I check to see oh, how are we doing here? It also can rule out your ads as being the problem. Let's say you have a really high cost per lead. If you look at your ads, and they have a click through rate that is several times the benchmark or significantly above it, you can almost rule out okay, well, it probably wasn't the ads, let's go look at the next step. Let's look at the landing page or the form we're using. Do we have good enough social proof on our landing page or featured in the ad? Or did our landing page load fast enough? All of those types of things. And if you get nothing else out of this episode, what I want you to understand is click through rate really ties together with all of the performance in your your account, it leads directly to your relevancy score. So those two are connected. And then that plays in to see how much you're going to pay depending on how you're bidding. So your costs per click are dependent on your relevancy score, and your click through rates. And if you're paying more for clicks, you're going to pay more for leads, assuming that your conversion rate stays static. So these are all connected. And so you as an ad manager, you're going to want to be paying close attention to this. But again, you're not going to want to go and report, I increase click through rates by 30%, to your boss or to your client, they honestly don't care, they are going to care about metrics that are a lot closer to the bottom of the funnel or the money. I should also mention that your relevancy score is really a cyclical kind of thing because when you have a good relevancy score, you'll get placed in better ad inventory, usually higher on the page, higher in the news feed, you'll be the top of the three text ads, etc. And when you're in the better ad positions, you show up closer to the top when people are willing to click. If your ad is four pages down in the feed, chances are the only people who are seeing it are the mindless scrollers. And you don't want them, they're not going to click. And if you want your budget to scale, let's say things are going really, really well and now you want to spend twice as much next month. Well, your relevancy score is the key to unlocking more impressions. Because as you get more impressions that will allow you to get obviously more clicks more leads, and spend more budget. I've found for scale, your click through rate is the easiest lever to pull. If you know that you want to scale up, but as you try, you just end up paying more and not getting too much more then launching new ads or launching new offers that have a higher click through rate is by far the easiest way to get that additional scale without paying way too much for it. In Episode 29, we talked about ad saturation. So if you're not familiar with that episode, go familiarize yourself with it. But I found that your click through rate, especially watching it over time, is the strongest signal that you can have to track whether your ads or your offers are saturating an audience. And the easiest way to do this is to go into your performance chart in your account. That's episode 52, if you're not familiar with that one. And you can plot any campaign or ad, buy click through rate over time. And what you might see is that 30 days ago, the average click through rate was, let's say 0.8%. But over the course of a month, now it's crept down to where it's 0.5%. That's a signal that you continue to show the ad to the same people who've already seen it before and probably aren't going to click, you definitely want to catch this and launch something new, constantly refreshing your account, because you don't want those click through rates to fall over time. Because that factors into your historical click through rate, which can earn you poor relevancy scores. So stay on top of it don't ever sit on your LinkedIn Ads. 18:05 So let's say that your click through rate is high. But your conversion rate is low. Like we talked about before, it could be that your landing page experience or your forms that there's an issue there. But what if they're not what if your ad and your landing page and your forms, they're all pretty congruent, this could be a sign that your ads are click baity. Or maybe you're using salacious imagery that makes people want to click, but it's not a serious interested click, it's a curiosity click. Maybe your ads are a thirst trap, you're featuring a really attractive person in your ad, and someone clicks because they want to see more of that attractive person and they're like, Oh, they're not there on the landing page. I'm going to be done here. But assuming that you wrote your ad, not in a way to trick people. A poor conversion rate usually means that your ads are fine, but your landing page experience is not. But that doesn't mean that your click through rate metric isn't important though, because it really does. It's the first page to your whole story. And whether it's high or low, will help you diagnose issues or spot high performance all the way through your funnel. And of course, you're always going to be wanting to watch for any sources of friction. And you want to remove that friction obviously anytime you can. You really do have to think about your whole strategy and realize that click through rate is just a piece of this whole strategy. And just because your click through rates are bad, it doesn't mean your whole strategy is broken. Dennis Yu, the famous Facebook ads expert, talks about things being a warning light or like a check engine light. Think of your click through rate as really just being a check engine light. It's an indicator that something could be wrong and that it should be looked at but it doesn't mean that the car is going to crash or break down in the next mile. 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. 20:08 Okay, like we talked about in the episode, you'll see in the show notes down below the episode about benchmarking your performance, as well as the episode about how to use the performance chart. You'll also see the link to the video that LinkedIn released about how the LinkedIn auction works. Definitely well worth a watch. I get asked a lot about courses, I've released a course in tandem with LinkedIn. It's on the LinkedIn Learning platform. You'll see a link down below. It's an incredibly inexpensive course and it's only about an hour and a half. It's fantastic. High quality, great learnings and that's enough, usually to get a new advertiser off the ground. On whatever platform you're listening to this on, look down and hit the subscribe button. We'd absolutely love to have you around for the next episode. And if you like what you're hearing, please do rate the podcast and leave us a review. I'll shout out your review live on air. Well, as live as it is. It's pre-recorded, obviously about a week in advance. But either way, I'd love to shout you out. With any questions, thoughts, suggestions, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week, cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Brenda Meller's post detailing all the new industries Oribi Aquisition Company Engagement Report New Pages Updates NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.   Show Transcript LinkedIn Ads has a lot of options for retargeting and nurturing your prospects. What's worth using and what isn't. We'll talk about all of this in more in 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're probably aware that retargeting ads are some of the most powerful ads that you can run, and also one of the cheapest. It's kind of like a digital marketing superpower. So LinkedIn has had retargeting since 2017. But I've never really been all that hot on it for reasons that we'll get into today. But in the last few years, LinkedIn has given us some really great firepower for nurturing our prospects. We'll dive into the different retargeting and nurturing strategies that you can use, even right now, to get the best bang for your hard earned marketing budget buck. First, let's cover the news because there's been a lot this week. In our Account Based Marketing episode that was episode 56, we talked about the company engagement report. This is when you upload a list of company names into your matched audiences and then you can click into them later to see which individual companies have been seeing your ads and engaging with them. Well, this was always really hard to share with your sales team or your ops team. And you can imagine how valuable that might be to get over to sales or get over to maybe your marketing or sales ops, like, hey, these two companies are really engaging with our stuff, right now, it might be a good time to reach out to them. Well, LinkedIn announced this week that your company engagement report is now going to have a CSV export feature. So now you can download this into Excel and send it around to whomever you'd like. About two weeks ago, LinkedIn announced that they acquired an Israeli company called Oribi. LinkedIn's own words, they said, "Through the integration of Oribi's technology into our marketing solutions platform, our customers will benefit from enhanced campaign attribution to optimize the ROI of their advertising strategies. This means that our customers will be able to more easily measure website conversions with automated tags and code free technology, as well as build more effective audiences, all in a way that is privacy first by design." What this tells me is this is a technology that's going to help us with attribution and conversion tracking. Basically, a lot of the stuff that we're losing as cookies go away. So, it all sounds really good on the surface, I'm really excited to see what LinkedIn does with it. Also, I'm sure you've all felt the same pain that we have, which is when you go to select an industry in LinkedIn's company pages, or even on your personal profile, the choices were very limited. I think there were only something like 26 different industries that you could choose. Correct me if I'm wrong on that. Well, something that is absolutely fantastic, LinkedIn reached out and said, Hey, we're expanding our number of industries that you can claim to over 400 different industries. If you are using industry targeting, this may be a huge help to you. But LinkedIn, and I know you listen, I have a huge ask for you on this one. I noticed when going through all of the new industries that we could select, we couldn't select SAAS software, and we couldn't select B2B. Those are two that for the longest time, I've really struggled to figure out how we can effectively target SAAS companies on LinkedIn, as well as those who are B2B versus B2C. If there's any way that we could get those somehow wrapped up in our targeting, or in company page classifications, that would be amazing. You should be able to go right now and start typing any industries that you think you might want to claim within your company page, and LinkedIn will auto populate some of the options there. If you're curious about all 400, a friend of the show, Brenda Miller, has created a post on LinkedIn that lists out all 400 of them. So we're going to go ahead and link to that in the show notes below. If you're curious to check out all the options, definitely check out her post. And Brenda thanks for putting that together. That's a great resource. And then a note from LinkedIn that in June of this year, 2022, the new industries are going to be released in the campaign manager and we'll be able to view or add these new options to any campaign. Excellent news that we're excited for. Alright, excited to jump into retargeting and nurturing. Let's hit it. First, I think we have to touch on the principle of what nurturing and what retargeting are supposed to be. The concept here is that it usually takes about seven to ten touches with a brand before someone will add the brand to their consideration set where they'll actually consider doing business with you. We know that people need multiple touches with your brand to get them into the funnel. We also know that a lot of us on LinkedIn are doing this with products and services that are extremely high consideration and high costs, which means more and more people have to be involved in this purchase decision. We call them the purchase committee. And so you start looking at, okay, everyone needs seven to ten touches. And there's quite a few people here within the buying committee and so now we're talking about needing a lot of touches on these people in order to secure them wanting to do business with you, or at least considering. So what is a touch? Well, in my mind, a touch is anytime that someone has some sort of an experience with your brand. That could be as low as they saw an ad on their screen and just took note of it and moved on. Others might be a full, they've downloaded an asset of yours, or they visited your webpage and clicked around. I'm wondering how many times you have ads on your prospect screen that they haven't even taken note of they've just scrolled right past. So in that case, we certainly couldn't call an impression, a touch. Just because LinkedIn charges you for an impression doesn't mean that it actually sunk in for your prospect. I like to talk about someone's know, like, and trust factor. If someone's going to do business with you, they need to know you, like you, and trust you. So think about how you build your know, like, and trust factor for any brand out there. Which brands do you absolutely love? And are you a huge fan of? Which ones will you support publicly without needing to be compensated in some way? Think about how you can copy those things that that brand has done for you to your own marketing so you can be doing that for your prospects. An example of how this principle works for me, about 10 years ago, I was really into Twitter, it was really heating up, I was having great conversations and getting a lot of value out of it. But I also noticed that a lot of my friends and industry colleagues would share content on there. But being a very busy professional and not having the time to read every single article that came through my feed, I set a rule for myself. That was if any one or two times that content was posted in the feed, I wouldn't worry about it. But if I saw three or more of the people that I follow, all reference the same article or topic, I would take the time to go and actually read it and research it. What I was doing is relying on multiple sources to share something before I found it worthy of my time. I think the same rule applies, like if you talk about popularity in high school. So if you can imagine one person in high school walking around and telling everyone, Hey, everyone, I'm popular, and they say it 1000 times, that doesn't actually help you believe it. In fact, you might actually believe that that person is the epitome of uncool. On the other hand, if you hear from 1000 Different students that this one student is really cool. She is the coolest girl at school. And even if the people who are talking about it are not the people that you trust, you hear it from enough sources, it starts to really sink in. So we know that when we hear about brands from multiple sources, it's going to help improve our know like and trust factor with that brand, much faster than if they just keep seeing you from exactly one source. In B2B, we know that someone is probably not yet ready to convert at the bottom of the funnel, the very first time they hear about your brand. So then it requires you to continue to warm up that prospect all the way from when they are cold and maybe have never even heard of you before until they are warm enough that they're ready to convert at the bottom of the funnel and become a customer or at least get a proposal or consider talking to someone. That ability to warm someone up is something that we can do through continued advertising. But it's especially powerful when we talk about retargeting those prospects. The lazy marketer will do this by just showing the same ads over and over to the same prospect. And to me, that's the equivalent of the one person in high school walking around and telling everyone how popular they are. It's not going to be believable. On the other hand, if that prospect is seeing you on certainly in the LinkedIn feed, maybe they see you across multiple different ad formats. Maybe they get a message from you inside of their sponsored messaging. This just keeps getting stronger and stronger, the more channels that you're targeting on. So sure, we're going to advocate running all of your ads on LinkedIn because that's all we do, but I also understand the value of making sure that that same prospect is seeing you when they log on to Facebook and Instagram and they see you on TikTok and they see you on YouTube. All of these are fantastic channels, and that really increase your know, like, and trust factor very quickly. And they're not all that expensive. Your job as a marketer is going to be what are the offers that I can come up with that are going to warm someone up and get their attention and nurture them, and maybe even help identify what sort of problems they face so that we can keep solving those in the future. That is a huge job ahead of you. But one that when you solve it, it's pure gold, and it's going to pay off for years and years to come. And as your retargeting and nurturing your prospects, it's important to understand that if you have an offer or ads that aren't performing or aren't converting, then you constantly need to be introducing new offers, and you constantly need to be shaking things up. 10:48 Website Retargeting So first off, let's talk about all the retargeting options that we have here on LinkedIn. First off, we have website retargeting, and this is the one that came out in 2017, which I was really excited about, but it ended up really deflating my sales just because there were so many weaknesses with it. So first off, when you're retargeting just on LinkedIn, you're showing ads to people only when they're on LinkedIn. And as we know, LinkedIn isn't the platform that the majority of your prospects are spending lots and lots of time on every single day. So that makes it a little bit weaker. If your goal of retargeting is to stay top of mind and stay in front of your prospects, then if you're only doing it on LinkedIn, you're leaving a lot of money on the table. When website retargeting first launched, LinkedIn said that those audiences would only store for 90 days. It turns out there was a little bit of an internal mistake where they were actually storing those audiences for longer, it was more like 180 days, which is right on par with Facebook, actually. But when I first saw 90, I went, Man, we're spending a lot of money on our LinkedIn traffic to retarget it and know that when we add someone to an audience, and it's only going to stick around for 90 days before rolling over, it doesn't get me excited enough to actually go and do something about it. Then there was the issue of costs, you know, we were paying $8 to $12 per click. And then when we used LinkedIn retargeting, we were still paying like four to $8 per click, sometimes even more. And so when we talk about retargeting being a good deal, it almost like it wasn't all that great of a deal. Plus, you need to have at least 300 people in your audience. So if I am doing a retargeting audience based off of just people who've clicked on my ads, I have to pay for at least 300 people to make it to my landing page or to my website to cookie them before I can even start advertising. So it was kind of a large hurdle to get over for the smaller advertisers for sure. The larger advertisers no problem. I mean, you get 300 clicks in pretty short measure. But for a smaller company or a smaller spend where 300 clicks per month would be a lot, it makes it a lot harder. So all of that to say that LinkedIn's website retargeting was never all that great value. But now we add to that the fact that LinkedIn's website retargeting is all based on cookies, and after the iOS 14 update, when all Apple devices stopped storing third party cookies, we looked at it and said, Oh, there goes half of our traffic, maybe this isn't all that great. And then add that to the fact that here in the next six to nine months, Chrome is probably going to be treating cookies the same way. So now there goes the other half of your audience. I know you didn't ask, but for my predictions here, I would say that in the next six to nine months, when Chrome does this, we're probably going to be left with audience sizes that are maybe 10 to 20% of what they were before the iOS 14 update. And this for sure isn't a good thing. That means that our retargeting audiences that we've built are just a 10th, or maybe a 20th as effective, but I don't want to paint a picture of all doom and gloom here. For the future. Maybe this isn't going to be a great long term avenue for you. But in the short term, realize that there may still be some value left. There's nothing stopping you from right now, even if you haven't started yet. Go and start building up your LinkedIn website retargeting audiences and get use out of them while you can make hay while the sun is still shining. Okay, so that's website retargeting. Event Retargeting Then there's something actually really exciting, which is event retargeting. So you can imagine with website retargeting, the technology that we're relying on is that when someone visits your website, your insight tag fires, and it communicates to LinkedIn who that person is. It allows LinkedIn to see based off of the cookie in their browser on their computer, if they are a LinkedIn member. If they're logged in LinkedIn can recognize them, then LinkedIn will make a note that that person has, indeed, visited your page and now they can put them into some kind of a retargeting audience. This is all based on the fact that LinkedIn as a third party has to be able to identify who someone is on your website and privacy concerns are going to make that a lot more difficult. But whenever someone takes an action on Linkedin.com, of course, LinkedIn knows. That's called event retargeting. So you can imagine someone is logged in, LinkedIn knows exactly who they are, they see one of your ads, they click on it, they convert on it, they watch a video, all of these things are things that LinkedIn can tell immediately. They know exactly who. They know exactly when. And as long as they have the server space on the back end, they're able to track this. This type of retargeting has been going on for years and years on Facebook, Facebook has pioneered it and it's so so good over there. LinkedIn has been rolling out some of these events that you can retarget over the last several years and honestly, they just keep getting better and better. And the most exciting thing I can mention is that LinkedIn just barely released a new one, that is actually the most powerful of all of them. So we'll get to that here in a minute, make sure you stick around. So here are some of the events that we can retarget, we've been able to retarget, those who have submitted a lead generation form. We can also separately track those who have opened a lead generation form. So that means they have taken enough of an action on an ad that it would trigger the form dropping down. So even if they didn't actually fill out and submit the form, you're still getting something from them, which is pretty exciting. But you might say to yourself, ma'am, that's a pretty big commitment for someone to actually engage with an ad like that, like they want to convert. We're not getting very many people into our funnel. Okay, I understand you there. And it's a very valid point. Okay, what about this, we've been able to target people who have watched at least 25% of a video ad. That's pretty cool. So you have these video ads out there. It's a little janky and difficult to set up for sure. But you have all these videos marked as if someone watches at least 25% of this, add them to this audience. Okay, I can still hear you saying, yeah, but 25%. If I have like a three minute long video, again, I'm capturing next to no one, only those are sticking around for 25% of that. Okay, so this one's a little bit more exciting. What about those who have visited your company page? Anyone who's visited your company page, you can add to a retargeting audience. And that, I think is a lot more exciting for sure. Okay, at that point, you may say, All right, well, company page, that means they haven't necessarily interacted with any of my ads, they could have gone to a company page a different way. Okay, I understand there's a little bit of a weakness there. But if you're running an event off of your company page, and someone is marked as interested like they want to attend, ah, we can now add them to a retargeting audience. And that's pretty cool. They've showed enough of an interest in an event that we've put on that they're probably going to be interested in future content as well, around those same topics. That's pretty powerful. 18:21 Single Image Ad Interactions All right, that takes us to the one that I told you, I was so excited about. This is the one that just rolled out. This is single image ad interactions. By the time you're hearing this, you should be able to go into your matched audiences and create a new event. And then if you see single image as one of your options, you know, you have this, I think it's rolled out to everyone at this point. But if not just wait a couple weeks. As you set this up, you have two different options. You can one retarget anyone who had a paid click interaction. That means they took an action that if you were paying by the click you would have gotten charged for. If that's a website visits campaign, that's going to be someone who clicked on your link, which is pretty cool because like we talked about with website retargeting, it's pretty weak when you are sending someone to your landing page. And then you know that maybe only 10 to 20% of the people who make it to the landing page are even going to make it into that audience. Add to the fact that if your page loads slowly, some people may bounce after they've clicked, but when the page doesn't load as fast as they were hoping, then they just leave. So you're left with almost no audience to be able to retarget Well, if you have this set up for single image retargeting, what you can do is anyone who clicked on your call to action is going to be put into this audience, whether they make it to your landing page or not, whether their cookie is recognized or not by the time they make it to your website. So this makes it ultra powerful to be able to retarget those who have clicked on your ads. That is really cool in my opinion. But then they've stepped it up even one more degree, this is a lot closer to where Facebook has it. If you're running a single image ad, you can retarget anyone who had any sort of interaction on that ad, that means a like a comment a reshare. they've clicked on your company page, maybe they've followed your company page from there. This is extremely powerful for noting whether someone has had truly some kind of a touch with your brand. We're doing quite a bit of testing around the single image interaction and click retargeting. So I'm sure we'll have more to share with you later. 20:40 Matched Audiences Let's move on to another retargeting option that we have called matched audiences. Now website retargeting is technically part of matched audiences. But the part that I get most excited about matched audiences for are the lists that you upload. So this is where you can take a list of people who maybe have converted already on your website, and you can upload them to LinkedIn and target them. You can also upload company lists, and narrow your targeting on those companies to get just those who have had some sort of an interaction with your brand in the past. Where you upload a list of contacts, we'll call that contact lists. And there's lots of different ways that you can treat these. You might break up your contact lists by what stage of the funnel they're in. For instance, if you have a list that you know are all cold contacts. Maybe they've had some sort of minor interaction with your brand, or maybe they haven't had any sort of interaction, and you want them to have an interaction with your brand. Then what you can do is upload these into a campaign. And you can promote a more top of funnel type of offer. Something to get their attention and get them to have a positive view of you. Then, of course, if you have a list of prospects, who are maybe a little bit further down the funnel. Maybe these are those who've converted in some way. You can show them maybe more of a mid funnel type of offer. And then maybe you have another list that are further along down the funnel. Maybe those who they're already in contact with your sales team. Maybe you've already given them a proposal, and you're hoping that this deal closes. Well, maybe you can either promote to them more bottom of funnel type of offer, or just stay in front of them long enough to help them make that decision as they're talking to their buyers committee. The kinds of lists that you can be thinking of, if you're not quite sure what you can grab. You can grab a list of your competitors, you can grab a list of your current customers, you could get a list of your past customers, like we talked about, you can have a cold list of prospects, maybe you're presenting at a show. And the show will give you a list of the people who've signed up to attend. Maybe you have a warm opt in list that you can upload and work with. Maybe if you're using a software like HubSpot that has a direct integration into LinkedIn, you can have a dynamic list where as someone is added to your CRM, they're automatically added to some sort of a list for retargeting or nurture on LinkedIn. When you go to upload a list to LinkedIn a contact list, one of the things that they have is an offline events list option. I looked into it because I haven't seen this before and to be honest, I'm not sure how this is different than any other contact list, other than it contains a few extra columns, one about like how much they paid for their ticket, and the ticket purchase timestamp. Because this is an offline event where LinkedIn wouldn't have any sort of vision into it. I'm not quite sure what value you would get out of matching these details, because LinkedIn won't know how much someone paid for their ticket, or won't know when a ticket was purchased. But maybe in the future, this could be used for like optimizing ads towards people who paid more for their tickets. So maybe they're a higher quality prospect. I don't know how this is working, but if you're not sure on how to use this one, and you are using offline events, just upload it as a normal contact list and you'll be good. I mentioned that we were doing some cool research around the single image interactions. And what we did is we went and created a separate audience, for those who have interacted with an ad in the last 30 days, the last 60 days, the last 90 days, the last 180 days, and the last 365 days. And what's so cool to me about this is something that Facebook has done that I honestly didn't think that LinkedIn was going to do. It will actually build these audiences in arrears. What I mean by that is if you go in right now and you set up one of these audiences to target anyone who's clicked on one of your ads for the last 30 days. Yoou know you create the campaign today, it'll take the full 72 hours to build that audience, and then it will actually go and put all of the people who've interacted with that ad in the last 30 days. In that audience. It goes back and grabs them, even from before they have this option, really cool. What I love about this is you can actually go and create all five of these audiences and you can even double them. You know, 30 days of interacting with the ad and 30 days clicking on it, and then 60 days interacting with the ad, and then 60 days clicking on it. You could create 10 separate audiences that you can use. And what I love about this is that you can actually graduate people through these funnels now. So if it's just tracking people who've interacted in the last 30 days, after 30 days passes, they will fall out of that audience, but they'll still be in the 60 day audience. So you could create different campaigns that pick someone up after they've not interacted with your brand in a while and try to warm them back up. It is important to remember that you still need at least 300 unique audience members in each in order for the ads to run, but set them up now, so that they're all ready to go once you have that many clicks. As we went and built these, we noticed that LinkedIn will tell us the number of engagements that an individual audience had. And then after the list processes, it told us a smaller number of people who are now in that audience. And the way that I interpreted that for one of our clients, it said that there were something like 11,800 engagements from that audience as we were building the segment. And then after it was done, it produced a list of 7,200 users. That tells me that, yeah, 7,200 people were responsible for those 11,800 engagements, which means that on average, each person in an audience was responsible for almost two engagements. That tells us a little bit about the frequency that we're hitting them on, which is pretty cool. Okay, we're gonna take a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into the general nurture strategies that we can use. The LinkedIn Ads show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. If the performance of your LinkedIn ads is important to you, B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $150 million on LinkedIn Ads, and no one outperforms us on getting you the lowest cost per lead, and the ultimate scale. Were official LinkedIn partners and from day one, you'll only deal with LinkedIn Ads experts. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to chat about your campaigns. We'd absolutely love to explore working with you. 27:33 Top of Funnel Okay, let's jump into some of the different nurturing strategies that we can use now that we know about the different tools that LinkedIn has given us to retarget people. I think first we need to talk about those who are top of funnel. So these are cold prospects, maybe they've seen your company at some point, or maybe they've taken some light action. There's a couple different strategies I might recommend. The first and lightest would be, you could put some kind of an offer together that's ungated and show it to them in hopes that you're just going to get them exposed positively to your brand. This, as we've talked about on previous episodes, is a very expensive strategy on LinkedIn, because you're going to pay $8 to $13 per click for people to go to a blog post or go to an ungated asset. There isn't a great way of staying in front of them on other platforms. We know if you send them to a landing page, and you're retargeting on Google and on Facebook, and you've got your LinkedIn retargeting set up, then you'll have a better chance, but it won't be bulletproof, for sure. All of those clicks will add up to something where you're not even asking them to convert. So you may not have that vote of knowing whether or not this is working because you're not seeing conversions come in. You could do a step up, which is you could gate that content. Showing them offers like free guides and checklists and cheat sheets, where they do have to enter in their personal information. This tends to be one of the strategies that we recommend the most for newer advertisers. And then you could take some of these event retargeting, as well as your website retargeting and show similar offers, or maybe even the same offer to those who haven't converted. And this is even stronger because of that new single image event retargeting because we can target those who clicked, but didn't convert, especially if it's like a lead gen form. If they need more warming up, you can always promote a more top of funnel or middle of funnel offer before jumping into a bottom of funnel offer. So what I mean by this is, let's say that you are running someone through a three stage funnel. So there's a top of funnel piece of content like a free guide, then the next offer they're introduced to might be something a little bit higher engagement, like join a webinar or an online event. And then your final step in the funnel might be talk to someone, set up a call, get a demo. Well, if you're running this and you notice that your sales team is talking about these being low conversion rate from MQL to SQL, or the leads just aren't ready yet, you could always insert one more step in there. You can say, Okay, we're going to try to top of funnels, or we're going to try a top of funnel and then to middle of funnel offers, before jumping them writes that bottom of funnel. Now I have to tell you, this is absolutely revolutionary that we can do this on LinkedIn, we didn't used to be able to create these bulletproof funnels, but now we can. We can start building these audiences of just those who've interacted with certain content. It's way cool. The kinds of offers that you might consider for cold audiences might be something like a blog post, or an infographic that or ungated. Or the kinds of things that might be gated could be things like a free checklist, or cheat sheet, a guide, an ebook, maybe even something like a webinar, or an in person event, those are getting a little bit more high engagement and high friction, I get asked a lot about case studies promoting case studies, either for the middle of funnel or top of funnel, or even bottom of funnel. And what I do is I split case studies into two different camps because there's two different really kinds of case studies, I have one that is more of a sales piece, and then one that's more of a guide. So if you look at your case studies, and you say, oh, what this is really saying is, look how awesome my company is, because we've had this success with this awesome client, then that's a sales case study and I would say that is already very bottom of funnel. You're not going to want to gate something like that near the top or middle of your funnel, because the only time someone would actually be interested in that kind of content would be if they're already considering doing business with you and they just want some proof that you are legit, that you are who you say you are. But if you have a case study that's very much like, Hey, here's the problem we face, and here are the concrete steps that we went through in order to get this outcome, and here's the outcome we had, and here were the things we tried, and the things that didn't work and did work. Now you can follow this exact same guide and get exactly the same outcome. You could still call it a case study, but I might also call it a guide or a checklist. And that is actually going to be valuable for everyone, even top of funnel. So take a look at your different case studies and see which of those categories yours falls under. If you're more middle of funnel with these prospects with a list that you're working on, I think you can go to the more high touch, the more high friction types of offers out there. So you might consider a webinar or a sales in case study or an in person event. And then when you get to the bottom of the funnel, that's obviously when you earned your spot to be able to ask them for things like talk to a sales rep, buy now, take a free trial of your software. Really anything that earlier stages in the funnel, they're not going to be ready for yet. So maybe you're thinking to yourself, hey, AJ, should I be setting up some sort of a retargeting campaign on LinkedIn? Should my company be nurturing? The answer is, absolutely, I don't care who you are. Everyone should be running retargeting in some form or another. There's no excuse not to at least get it setting up and building audiences so even if you're not ready to use them right now, you can still use them in the future. Remember with those website retargeting audiences, if you don't have that setup now and gaining audience members, every day that you put off doing that you're losing people in your audience, whereas with the single image retargeting that LinkedIn just gave us, and I hope they roll this kind of functionality out to all of their events, we really can set that up at any point in time, just realize that there is a 72 hour processing time. 33:56 Sequences So now we have this ability to run people through sequences. We can sequence them by how long ago, they committed some sort of an action, and then graduate them to the next step, once they've either taken a certain action, or it's just been longer than 30 days or whatever. If you're just brand new to this and let's say that some of your lists, you don't have enough people in them to run ads by themselves. What I would suggest doing is stacking your lists. What you might say is in one campaign, one beautiful retargeting campaign, you're going to have anyone who's watched at least 25% of your video ads. And then you add to that anyone who's opened a lead gen form. You can also add company page visitors. And you can do this until each segment of your audience is large enough to run on its own or just keep them combined if you only want one retargeting audience to stay in front of all of them, rather than having to run five or six different campaigns. If you're looking to build an audience as fast as possible, the fastest way to do this is still to run a short video ad, lets say something that is eight seconds or there abouts, and target anyone who's watched at least 25% of that video, then trigger showing them the next ad. That's the fastest way to build a retargeting audience. Now I mentioned ways of retargeting people and interacting with them off of LinkedIn. We call this maybe a holistic retargeting strategy, or a holistic marketing strategy. If you want to retarget on Google when you get people to your website, it's the same minimum that LinkedIn has, you have to have at least 300 people in an audience, but what you do get is access to incredible inventory. You have access to all of Googles Google Display Network, which is like 80% of the web out there. If your goal in retargeting is to stay in front of someone, and keep top of mind, there's no better way than on Google to do that. You get them everywhere that they are surfing around and looking for information. Then you've got Facebook, which last time I checked, the minimum to run a Facebook retargeting audience was like 20 people so much, much lower than LinkedIn and Google's 300 person minimum. That makes it an incredible place to start retargeting because you don't need very many visitors before you can start doing that. Of course, you can do email nurture, which is kind of like retargeting, but once you have someone's email address, you're retargeting them through their email inbox. Which you're obviously not doing through an ad platform, you would do that through your email provider or through your marketing automation software, but it's a great way of just having one additional touch with your brand. We've talked a little bit about how retargeting is taking a hit on LinkedIn with the cookie going away. And it's true retargeting has definitely taken a hit. And this is not just limited to LinkedIn, Facebook and Google are absolutely reeling, trying to figure out what's the best way that they can keep their retargeting technologies working because once those cookies are gone, they lose so many of the ways that they get signals on who's interacting with ads. But I will say Facebook and Google are still the most advanced ad platforms on the planet and if anyone can solve it, it is them. No matter whether you're currently advertising on Google and or Facebook right now, go set up your retargeting audiences so that they're building so that you can do this in the future. Because again, if you don't get it set up, now, you're losing all of those people who would be interacting today. All right, I've got the episode resources coming for you right up. So stick around. Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 37:52 Okay, first of all, in the episode resources, you'll see the link to Brenda Miller's post, where she details out all 400 of the new industries that she's found. If you're curious to see what's coming, or what's already there, go check out her post, you'll also see a link to Lincoln's announcement about the Oribi acquisition. We've also covered quite a bit about the accompany engagement report, but you'll also see a link there where we pulled that information about being able to export those to CSV. And then finally, with all of these new updates to pages, including the new industries, you'll see the link to LinkedIn's announcement about all of the new pages features and updates. If you were any of your colleagues or friends are trying to learn LinkedIn ads, definitely check out the link to the LinkedIn Learning course that I did with LinkedIn. Whoo, saying the word LinkedIn a lot. You think I'd be used to that by now? Anyway, check out that link. It is by far the least expensive and the highest quality training that there is out there. And of course, it is LinkedIn recommended. However you're listening to this podcast, please look down and hit that subscribe button. If you're listening to us on our YouTube channel now since we started publishing to YouTube, definitely follow the channel for new updates there. As soon as YouTube lets us actually run our own podcast channel through it, we"ll be set up on that as well. You've heard me say this a lot, but I want you to think really hard about if you've done it, please rate and review the podcast. I'd absolutely love to shout you out live on the episode. And of course, anytime that you rate and review it really does help us find new members who are also LinkedIn Ads pros who are looking to do this better. With any suggestions or questions about the podcast. Feel free to reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Chris Dayley AJ Wilcox Investopedia LIs advice for optimization NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.   Show Transcript AJ Wilcox You're running and testing your LinkedIn Ads. But how do you know when your test is complete? When something isn't working? How do you know when it's time to pivot? We're covering deep testing strategy 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. So we've all been told that we need to always be testing with our ads. Well, sometimes it can be hard to know when our tests are conclusive. Or when it's time to move on to a new test, or even what do we need to be testing? Well, if you test too long, you end up missing opportunities for more learnings. And if you test too short, you risk coming to the wrong conclusion, which can really be costly on your future performance. So this week, we're gonna dive deep, we're going to talk about the different types of tests that you can run, and how to tell when they're complete. Make sure to listen to the end, because I'm going to be sharing my methodology for deciding which tests to run next, after you found conclusive results from your previous test. So first off in the news, I got a chance to talk to a friend who's part of a really cool beta for LinkedIn right now. It's called the audience insights beta. And essentially, what it is, is a really granular breakdown of the audience makeup of the attributes from a matched audience. You can think of it as a really helpful analysis of your target audience, as well as a great tool for understanding the ways that LinkedIn targets better. The way that it works is you'll go into your matched audiences section, and you'll select one of those audiences, then this can be any sort of a matched audience, it could be a website retargeting audience, or anyone who's submitted a form, or anyone who's visited your company page, you get the idea. Then you click a button that says, generate insights and it will open up a dashboard about that audience. And what you get here is a whole bunch of different facets and breakdowns of what makes up your audience. It'll show you your existing audience size. And it will tell you how many of those people fit into different categories. There's interests, so this is where you can find out which interests that your target audience are tagged with. And this can help you with your interest targeting, determining whether to use it, or how many or which types of interests to use. As a side note, I hardly ever use interest targeting because it's such a black box. But now with this, I actually feel a lot more comfortable in finding and using interest targeting. There's organic content, so you can see the trending content that is most engaging to this exact audience. You can see the location, and this is the profile location of where members of that audience are located. There's demographics, there's education, there's job experience. And this gets really exciting because it'll show you the seniority breakdown of your target audience, your job functions that fit within them, your years of experience, and even more. And as you probably know, when you're building a campaign over in the right rail, we get a little bit of an audience size breakdown, but this is really that on steroids. It's a supercharged version of audience Insights. And then as you're exploring here, it's really quick to create a campaign based off of the targeting you're exploring, which is pretty cool. When this feature sees full general audience release, we will definitely let you know more about it. But for right now, I wanted to give you a quick heads up on what's likely coming and how excited we are about it. AJ Wilcox 3:36 Okay, on to the testing topic. Let's hit it. So first off what is pivoting? You may have heard the Silicon Valley term to pivot. A business needs to pivot. When a business doesn't have product market fit, companies can pivot or adjust their strategies to find the right fit. You've probably also heard the axiom of fail fast, and that originates from Silicon Valley as well. And the concept is that by taking too much time doing the wrong thing, or a less effective thing, you risk so much more than if you were to just make a quick painful one time adjustment and get to that product market fit much quicker. The same risks are present in our ad testing. If you're testing two different ad concepts against each other to the same offer, but that offer is bad, what you're doing is you're wasting weeks of good potential performance that you could have from running a better offer. So definitely, we should always be testing something. And to be clear, not every test will be exactly what you want. Some tests will fail and others will win. And some will just be inconclusive, or some will teach you something but it's just not important. So pivoting is essentially knowing when something needs to be changed, or when to conclude your current test. You can pivot because something is working. You can pivot because something's not working. Or you can pivot just because it's time to want to test or try something new. AJ Wilcox 5:00 So we're going to do something we haven't done before on the podcast, I'm going to bring on a guest for explaining a certain topic. So please welcome Chris Dayley, CEO of smart CRO, who's going to explain the concept of scientific testing and statistical significance. Alright, we're doing something that we haven't done here on the podcast before, I got to bring in my friend Chris, who is a conversion optimization expert. A longtime friend, partner we met, it's probably been 11 or 12 years ago, maybe even more than that, where we're both doing SEO at the time. And anyway, this is Chris Daly, who runs smart CRO. And, Chris, I brought you on because we're going to be talking a little bit about statistical significance and obviously, this gets into the stats side and the math side of marketing, where many marketers who may have come from the more creative side may not have experience. So first of all, tell us about yourself. And then I'll ask you more of the meaty questions. Chris Dayley 6:00 First of all, thanks so much for having me on the show, man. You know, I'm one of your biggest fans and so I feel flattered to be on the show. And, you know, like you said, I've got, you know, more than a decade of background in digital marketing, I pivoted to conversion rate optimization about 10 years ago. And I've been running a conversion rate optimization agency for the last eight years, I think it'd be a fun fact, AJ, and I actually started our agencies like within a week of each other. And I called AJ, because I wanted to pitch a company that he was working at. And he's like, Oh, I'm actually not there anymore, I started an agency. And I was like, me too. Cool. So yeah, I've been doing version optimization for about the last eight years. And actually, I hated statistics when I took statistics in college. Probably one of the reasons I'm dropping out of college. But since I started doing conversion optimization, I've actually really fallen in love with a lot of the statistics that because of how applicable it is, and I'm excited to dig into this stuff with you. AJ Wilcox 7:01 So cool. Well, and the reason why I brought you on, Chris, I mean, every time I'm talking about statistical significance, or anything stats related, it's always parroting something I've heard on one of your, I think I've probably listened to 80 or more podcasts that you've been a guest on, and I've gotten to hear you speak at so many different conferences, and I'm basically just parroting stuff that I've heard from you. So I wanted to bring you on to ask these questions. Because I mean, why parrot what someone else said, why not just go right to the source? So tell us, first of all, what is statistical significance? What's the definition? And I guess why it matters? Chris Dayley 7:35 Yeah. So well, let me first say why it matters. So anytime you are measuring data, right, like when you're running ads, for example, and you see that one ad has a 50% conversion rate, and the other one has a 10% conversion rate. There's all sorts of questions that come to mind, once you hear that this one has a better conversion rate than the other one. You know, most marketers would want to know is, well, how reliable is that? How much data do you actually have? Are you talking about, you got 10 clicks on both of them, and one of them had five conversions and the other one had two, because that's not a very big data set. And so which makes that data not super reliable, or in other words, there's a huge risk or chance that's involved in saying that one thing is a winner and one thing is a loser when you have such a small data set. And so statistical significance is really a it's a statistical calculation of how confident you are that your results are not due to just random chance, right? Because, again, if you have 10 clicks on two different ads, and one of them has five conversions, and one of them has two, they obviously have a super, super different conversion rate there. But there's a huge likelihood that you might have just had like two people on the first ad that were awesome. And they could have landed on either ad and converted. And so you're not really sure if it's due to the ad, or just due to the fact that a couple of qualified people saw those ads. So anyways, the reason that statistical significance matters is you need to know with certainty that when you say an ad, or in my case, if you say that a variation of a landing page is better, you need to be pretty confident that that result will hold true because there's all sorts of risks that's involved. If you assume that the ad that got five clicks is better than the ad that got two clicks. And you start basing all of your marketing around that first ad, like let's say that that first ad had a video and the second one had an image, if you base all of your future ads off of the fact that you think a video worked better. But it turns out that actually if you had run that test for longer, the image would have performed better. You're going to really screw yourself over in the long run, you're going to end up operating under false assumptions. And so, again, statistical significance is just way to with confidence say that what you think is a winner is actually a winner. AJ Wilcox 10:05 Oh, yeah. Alright, so one thing I've heard you talk about you like to determine your statistical significance to that 95% confidence? Do they call it a confidence interval? I forget what it's called. Chris Dayley 10:16 Yeah, confidence interval or P value or whatever you want to call it. There's lots of different terms for it. But yes. AJ Wilcox 10:23 So why do you run your test to a 95% significance level? Other cases in marketing where you'd suggest a 90% or an 80%? Or do you recommend the 95 for all of us? Chris Dayley 10:34 Yeah, that's a good question. And let me break that down into a couple things. 95% statistical confidence means that you're 95% certain that this winner is actually a winner, right? And the reason that I like using 95%, as sort of a minimum threshold is obviously 100% would be ideal, right? To be 100% certain, but it usually takes a lot of traffic or a lot of data to get to 100% statistical confidence, unless you have a huge difference in numbers, right? Like, if you have 10,000 visitors that saw one ad, and you have 10 clicks, and you have 10,000 visitors that saw another ad, and you have 1,000 clicks, you'll have 100% statistical significance, because the difference, the discrepancy is massive. But again, if you're testing ads, for most datasets, you're going to end up with like, you know, 10,000 views and 500 clicks and 10,000 views, and 550 clicks. And, yes, the second ad had 50 more clicks, but there's only a 10% difference. And so it's gonna take a lot more data to know ,okay, was that for real? Was there something that fluency not variation? Or if you keep running for long enough, are they just going to even out? So 95%, it's a high enough confidence that there's still a very low chance of calling something a winner, that's not a winner. So there's only a 5% chance that if you say this is a winner, it's only a 5% chance that you're wrong. Right, which is, there's still a chance and it'd be great if there was zero chance, but I mean, my philosophy has always been if you're testing enough, like, if you are constantly running AB tests, on ads, or whatever, yes, maybe 5% of the wins that you called were false positives. But if you run enough tests, you're gonna end up with 95 winners, true winners, and maybe five that weren't true winners. But overall, by and large, you have a very, very high win rate there, right? That's the first thing. A 95%. For me, it's high enough that I feel confident, but it's not so high that it's impossible to reach. 100%, I view as very unlikely to get 100%. So the second part of your question is do you have to go with a 95% statistical significance. And I say no to that, I don't always run tests until I get a 95% and here's why. The closer the data is, so again, if you have 500 conversions on one, and 530 on another, you could be stuck at like an 85, or an 80% statistical significance. You might be stuck there for weeks, because there's lots of things that may happen. And one variation might get a few more conversions one day, which is going to decrease your static and then the next day, you might have a lot more conversions on the version, which is gonna increase your stats and so the statistical significance number is going to fluctuate over time. So I usually pair in or I add in a second rule, it's like my backup rule. So I like to shoot for 95% statistical significance. But if I end up with a variation that has been winning consistently for a period of two weeks, and I still don't have a 95% stat sig, then I will still call it a winner. Because even though you know, I might have an 85% stat sig. If I have a winner that has been consistently performing well, then I will use that longevity of data to sort of support okay, yes, I only have an 80% stat sig here. So there's a 20% chance I might not be calling a winner, but the data looks pretty reliable. Right? Like the test is being consistent. 95% If I can get it, and and if not, do I have consistent performance? AJ Wilcox 14:23 Oh, that's great. All right. So question for you then. What I love about testing to statistical significance, is we as marketers aren't shooting from the hip. We're not just gut checking all of our marketing, because that can obviously lead you down pretty bad roads. I know a lot of marketers do, but I don't recommend it. It allows us to approach this scientifically and actually be certain that you're learning stuff along the way. But how then do you know when you've reached statistical significance, because the LinkedIn ads platform isn't going to tell you, you don't get to register your AB test anywhere and have it monitoring? What tools do you use or what would you make available to yourself to watch this and grade your AB tests? Chris Dayley 15:01 Yeah, good question. There's lots of free tools. I mean, if you Google statistical significance calculator, there's tons of free calculators that you can use out there. I was showing you before this call that I've actually just developed my own inside of a Google Sheet, where I just use an API by just pulling all of the raw data from Google Analytics. And then I calculate my own statistical significance. Even though the tools that I use, do calculate it for me, I still like to have my own statistical significance calculations. You can grab tools online, and if you have a way of plugging in the raw data from LinkedIn, then you can calculate it. You can also just go in and like, you know, for example, Neil Patel on whether you like Neil Patel or not, he's got a free tool on his site, that you can just plug in the number of visitors or the number of, you know, like, if it's an ad, the number of impressions you have, and the number of clicks you have, or the number of clicks you have, and the number of conversions you had, or the number of impressions, you have, whatever, but you're going to plug in the number of "traffic", and then the number of conversions for each of your variations, and then it will give you a statistical significance calculation. So I mean, like I said, free tools, easy place to start, if you're not calculating statistical significance now, just go and grab the data from two of your ads and pop them into one of these tools. And it will calculate the statistical significance for you. The one other thing that I'll just say, say, you know, you'd mentioned that like, it's easy to shoot from the hip as a marketer. And statistical significance is a great way of ensuring you're not doing that. It also ensures and it also helps to put some checks in place so that you don't call tests too quickly. Because I know whether you are an in house marketer, or if you are an agency marketer, you always want to show your boss or your client, like you want to show them when these you want to show them wins as quickly as you can. And you want to mitigate the risk, you don't want to be running a test that is losing money for your company or your client for very long. And so the reason that I see people end tests too quickly, is because they're like, Yeah, but if that variation continues to perform that way, it's going to lose us a lot of money, or the opportunity cost is so high, because I could be generating so many more conversions from this other ad. And so statistical significance is a good way of like putting a check in place for yourself. So I always tell my clients, we're at least gonna run tests for a minimum of a week. Even if we see something just like blowing this other variation out of the water, we're still gonna give it a week, because things can change in a few days. And so you want to run experiments for long enough that you see some historical data in there. And the static will help with that. AJ Wilcox 17:43 What was so shocking to me when we were talking, this has been years and years ago, but you were showing me one of your tests for a giant enterprise company. And you were showing an AB test. And we were looking at this graph over time, and we could see that by like day five of your test, variation B had statistical significance, it was the winner by like 30%, or something high. And then it may not sound high to you, I know you get higher. But then you showed me the continuation of that graph. As the test kept going into week two, all of a sudden, variation, a took over with, again, statistical significance, and it was winning, and then it reverted back to B. So what I love about what you're saying is run the test for long enough, but realizing that stats can be misleading just because human behavior can change. But we really should be, I guess, tracking things that will stand the test of time, as well as just fitting our statistical significance. Chris Dayley 18:38 And I would say don't even calculate statistical significance until you have at least a week's worth of data. Because if you calculate stat sig on day one of a test, I almost guarantee, you'll get a calculation that says you have 100% statistical significance, because it's gonna be like, Hey, we have five conversions on this one, and none on this other one that will give you a 100% statistical significance. But it's such a small data set, it would be stupid to like call a winner with that small of a data set. So like I said, I don't even look at static until at least a weekend, because it really doesn't mean anything until then. AJ Wilcox 19:16 Yeah, and especially on a platform like LinkedIn, where every day is a little bit different. I know that a weekend day performs very different from a Monday, and I know the difference between a Monday and a Tuesday. They're closeish, but they're very different. And then you have the difference between a Friday, totally different. So you don't want to run for a partial week, especially to the LinkedIn audiences, when every one of those days has a little bit different of a personality. Love the idea of running for at least a week love the idea of two weeks, so you have to have each kind of day. And I love the idea of making sure that you're running whole days. You didn't start your test mid day one day. Chris Dayley Yep, absolutely. AJ Wilcox 19:55 All right. So kind of a fun little announcement here. Chris and I were talking before the call about creating a joint tool that we can then share with this audience. So make sure that down in the show notes, you'll see the link to both of our LinkedIn profiles. Make sure you're following us. So you'll get the free tool when we release it. We don't know how long it's gonna take, I have a crazy idea in my mind that I don't even know if it's possible. But whatever we come out with, I know it's gonna be cool. But Chris, where can people find you? Where can they follow you? Where do you put your stuff out? How do they get in touch with you? Just take us wherever you want us? Chris Dayley 20:26 Yeah, so the only social media platforms I'm on is LinkedIn and Twitter. So you can find me on Twitter, it's @ChrisDayley. Last name is D A Y L E Y. Or you can find me on LinkedIn. I'm not on Facebook, not on Instagram. And then my company website is smart-cro.com. You know, and again, I focus on website and landing page AB testing. And so if you're wanting to go from testing your ads to testing your landing page, your website, that's definitely something I'd be happy to chat with anybody about. AJ Wilcox 21:00 Awesome, Chris, thanks so much for enlightening us, we'd love to have you back on the show. At some point when I can think of a something else that we need your commentary on. But thanks again for for just being willing to come on and sharing your abundant knowledge. Chris Dayley 21:12 I will talk to you anytime you want to talk to AJ. So thanks for having me on the show. AJ Wilcox 21:15 All right party on. AJ Wilcox 21:17 So Chris, and I talked about different tools for calculating stat sig. In the show notes, you'll see a couple links to some tools that we've used to calculate that you can try out. And by way of instruction, here's how you'll use them. So what you'll see is an A and a B. And there's essentially a box for before and a box for after that you fill in. And this can be kind of confusing, but what you'll do, if you want to test the statistical significance of the click through rates on two different ads, what you'll do is in the top box, for your ad, a variation, you'll put in the number of clicks. And the bottom box, you'll put in the number of impressions that ad a received, then the same thing for ad B. In the top box, you put in the number of clicks, which is the number of results. And on the bottom, the number of impressions. So the number that it's out of. If you want to test conversions between two offers, it's the same type of thing, it's just in the top box, you're going to put in the number of conversions or leads. And in the bottom box, you're gonna put in the number of clicks, that's going to show you your winner. And the statistical significance. If there is some between the conversion rates, you could take this way further, if you have enough data on, let's say, sales, qualified leads or proposals sent, you could put the same thing in the number of those results with the number of leads or whatever it is you want underneath. Okay, so now you know how to use these tools, go check them out, go try them, and evaluate some of the tests that you're running. So I guess my first question is, how do you know when you have enough data to actually make a decision about your tests? LinkedIn has a section on their website in their help section that we've linked to in the show notes, so you can go read it. But basically, they say, you want to always be testing, which we definitely agree with. LinkedIn says every one to two weeks, pause the ad with the lowest engagement, and replace it with new ad creative. Over time, this will improve your ad relevance score, based on indicators that LinkedIn members find that that ad is interesting, such as clicks, comments and shares, which will help you win more bids. Since bid actually means something important when they say, which will help you win more bids. I think what they're probably trying to say is, which will help you win more auctions. But we'll let them make that clarification. LinkedIn also recommends include two to four ads in each campaign because campaigns with more ads usually reach more people in your target audience, I would disagree with the majority of that advice. What we found is that the learning phase when you launch ads, usually lasts about one to one and a half days. So if you have ads with really poor engagement, after let's say, your first two days, it's usually pretty safe to say, there's something wrong with these ads, we can take action now by pausing them and taking them off the table. That being said, even if click through rates really aren't great. Sometimes we'll keep them running just so that we can suss out the conversion rates because obviously, getting leads and getting a good cost per lead is way more important than the amount of engagement that an ad gets. But of course, we always do want good click through rates whenever we can. I'm also not in a hurry to pause the low engagement ads, since we're always using LinkedIn's option of optimizing the ads in the campaign to those that have the highest click through rate because that's going to send almost all of the impressions to the higher performing one anyway. So having another ad in there, that's just kind of dead weight. It's getting ignored anyway, so I'm not in a huge hurry, but its okay if you want to. We've talked about this before on the show, but I don't recommend including more than two ads per campaign. Since what it does is it it dilutes your AB test. If you're running an ABCD test, but your ad A gets 60% of the impressions and ad B gets 30%. And the last 10% are split between C and D. That doesn't make for a very good test with a lot of data, we would ideally want a lot more data spread around all of those variations. I get it LinkedIn asks us to put more ads in a campaign because it breaks the frequency caps and allows your ads to be shown more often, which will get you to spend more money. But I care a lot more about the performance of ads getting good performance than just spending all of my budget usually. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break. And then we'll dive into what you should watch for to evaluate your tests. The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. AJ Wilcox 25:56 if the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $150 million on LinkedIn Ads, and no one outperforms us on getting you the lowest cost per lead and the most scale. We're official LinkedIn partners and you'll deal only with LinkedIn Ads experts from day one. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to chat about your campaigns, we'd absolutely love to chat with you. AJ Wilcox 26:22 Alright, let's jump into what to watch for in your tests. First of all, you want to set your threshold. You want to decide what the parameters of your test are going to be. One parameter you could set is say I'm going to run this test for a certain amount of weeks or months or days, we heard Chris talk about how he wants to run for at least a full week. And with LinkedIn specifically, I would suggest running for at least two full weeks, you do also want to make sure that you are working from whole days, which means you'll want to start your test as close to midnight in the UTC timezone as possible. And then finish it around UTC midnight whenever you're finishing the test. But of course, if you see that the results are crazy different, like you have two offers, where after a week and a half, one of them is converting at 40%. And the other is converting at 6%. You don't have to finish the rest of your time period test as long as the data is there. And you can tell yes, definitively, this offer A that's converting at 40% is way better, you can determine your winner a little bit sooner. Another parameter you could set for your test is say we're going to allocate a certain amount of budget towards this, you can say 3000 Euro is going towards this test. We see a lot of marketers do this because their bosses give them a certain amount and they have to apportion it out and budget it across different things that they want to learn. This is certainly possible, but just make sure that by the time you're done spending that budget, you are running a statistical significance calculator across it to make sure that the results that you got can actually be trusted. Another way that you can set a parameter here is saying how much data you want to generate. So you might say, we want to run this test until we have 120 leads, or 400 clicks or anything like that. Again, you just want to make sure that the parameter you set here for the amount of data you want, is actually enough to make a difference. You may also set a threshold of stat sig between two ad variations on the click through rate level. And that's going to come pretty fast actually, because what you're doing is you're showing clicks compared to impressions across two different ad variations. And you could get that statistical significance quite quickly. You could take that a step further and run a test based on statistical significance at the conversion rate level. So now you're seeing which offer converts better. With even more data, you could do the same thing, statistical significance based off of which ad or which offer gets the highest number of marketing qualified leads. Another step further based off of sales, qualified leads, or proposals or closed deals. Now, if you want statistical significance between two ad variations or two offers all the way to the close deal, you will need to be spending a lot of money, this is in the millions per month in order to get here or you have to have been spending for years. I just want to level set you just in case you're thinking that sounds really fun. But if you're spending, you know $5k a month or something that's probably not realistic, I would stick more to like statistical significance at the conversion rate level. A lot of times we'll end up running pretty much the same ad variations, the same AB test across a lot of different campaigns. And so rather than trying to achieve statistical significance, within each one of those campaigns are we're looking at a small number of clicks and a small number of impressions. Instead, with a simple pivot table in Excel, we can combine the performance of all of those ads that were ad A and all of the ads in the account that are ad B add them all together. And then we're going to achieve our statistical significance so much faster. You can do the same thing with your costs per click. Measure which ads or which offers get a better cost per click. This obviously doesn't mean nearly as much as your leads, or close business does, but it is something you can test. Generally, the ads with the higher click through rates are going to get the lower cost per click. But if you're spending enough, something really good to test is your conversion rates. Which ad gets a higher conversion rate? Which ad variation gets a higher conversion rate? Which offers get a higher conversion rate? Which audiences get a higher conversion rate? These are all things that you can test again the same way with static, if you're getting data back from your sales team on lead quality, or if you have a lead scoring algorithm set up, you can judge your tests based off of lead quality or traffic quality that's coming from a certain audience. Then if one of your audiences is producing a higher lead quality, then you'll know that you can adjust your audience. Use more of the targeting that's winning less of the targeting that's bringing in the crappy quality. One word of warning here, though, is that with any social advertising, one issue that we're always going to face is ad saturation, which means changing performance over time. If you try to run the same test, and you run it for two months, chances are at the beginning of that two months, performance will look pretty good. But then about halfway through the test, you'll see performance falling, and then by the end, it might be abysmal. So if you try to lump those two months of performance together, you're going to get something that looks pretty average or maybe even bad. But what you didn't know is the first two weeks or the first month that it ran, it was really good. And you should want to do more of that. As a general rule of thumb, I found that your ads or your offers will saturate after usually about 28 to 33 days. But how do you know? Well, I like to go into the performance chart and look at campaign performance since the day of launch. And I like to look at click through rates over time, as the same people tend to be seeing your ads over and over and over, or they're exposed to the same offers, every time they're on LinkedIn, they're going to be much less likely to click over time and you'll see those click through rates drop. So with your tests, make sure that you're changing things up enough, or you're starting new tests, before your last test fully saturates and you watch performance drop over time. Sometimes I'll be running a test, and I stop the test not because it's finished, or I've achieved stat sig, it's because there's something else that is a higher priority thing that I want to learn. And I think that's just fine. If the opportunity cost of waiting for a test to finish is higher than the upside of what you're going to get out of learning something from the new test. Don't be afraid to either nix it or put that test on pause. And what you should know is, there are different kinds of tests that you can do. Some are easy, some are hard. But any test that we do that's closer to the money is going to teach us something more valuable. What I mean by that is testing things like ad copy. Sure, you can improve results by 5 to 15%, with different ads and different imagery. But by changing the offer, you can double, triple quadruple your results. By working with and coaching your sales team to get them in the right mindset to nurture the leads that you're generating from LinkedIn, that can improve your ROI by 10, 20%. But obviously, the closer you get to the money, the longer those tests are going to take. AJ Wilcox 33:36 So here are some of the types of tests that we like to run. There are ad tests and the first ad test that we like to run is same image, same headline, but we vary the intro in the ads. We like to test motivation there. So an example I like to use is maybe one of those makes them feel like the hero and the other one warns them that if they don't take some sort of action, they'll look bad or be disgraced. But you can definitely also do imagery or video ad tests, keeping the intro and the headline the same, but just varying visual. Testing offer against offer. So an ebook against a guide, or a checklist versus a cheat sheet, a webinar versus a case study. These are all good examples of offer tests you can run. What about how often should you fail before you decide that it's time to pivot and change your entire strategy? I'll give up on an offer if I've run three A B tests have messaging against it, and all six of those ads have failed. If that's the case, after our best effort, I'm certain that the offer just isn't that great. There's no amount of lipstick that I can put on that pig and make it look pretty. I guess this is gonna be my rule of threes because the same thing applies if I've tried three different offers in the same kind of vein. And if none of those offers work, that I'm going to guess we either don't have the right audiences or we don't have product market fit or we just haven't figured out what it is that this audience cares enough about. I just got a chance to speak at Social Media Marketing World in San Diego last week. And one of the speakers that I heard said something really interesting. We solve migraine problems, not headache problems. And what that means is your offers, they really do have to solve something really significant, that's causing a lot of pain, because someone's not going to go out of their way to go and sign up for something, or talk to a sales rep about something or download a guide about something that is just kind of a meh problem. If it's a headache, they can work through it. If it's a migraine, you have to stop everything and focus on it. So how do you then determine what your next test should be after you've finished one? If I have a brand new offer, my first test is almost always going to be an intro versus intro in these ads test against the same offer. I want to find out what motivation or how do we call out to them to get their attention best. If I've been running the same offer for more than a month, then my favorite test to line up is an image versus image test. And this is because if people have been seeing the same image over and over for a month, they're going to saturate, they're going to say, Ah, I've already seen that, and not pay attention to it. But if you can change up the imagery significantly, you'll get people to take a second look. And they may realize, ooh, this actually would be good for me. If you know what your audience likes already, you can start to do offer versus offer tests. So use the same motivation, the same callouts, but push them to one offer or another. Let's say you have two different offers. One is a guide that teaches them how to solve a certain problem. And the other guide teaches them how to investigate and analyze some of the results they're seeing. Test offer against offer and find out which is their bigger headache, or which ones their migraine. Maybe some of you have done market research. This is more on the PR side of marketing. But we get to do a lot of this with the level of testing that we can do on LinkedIn. Because the targeting is so good, we can break our audiences up into these little micro segments that act like little focus groups. So maybe you're trying to decide do operations folks, or do IT folks resonate more. Which one is our better customer? Do manager level seniorities interact with us in a different way than chief level or VP level? These are all tests that you can run simply by breaking these audiences up into separate campaigns and measuring their results against each other. The advice that I always give to my team is make sure that you keep a testing journal. This could be a Google sheet, it could be a physical notebook that you keep next to your desk, whatever it is, what this is going to be is a record of every test that you're running, and you want it to have a few things. First of all, you want to put the date. Second of all, you want to put the expected outcome of it. For instance, you might say I'm testing offer A against offer B. My hypothesis, so you include the hypothesis. My hypothesis is that offer B is going to perform better because I think it provides more value. Next you want to write down your parameters. So are you testing for a certain amount of time or after a certain amount of budget. And then lastly, you have to take action on this, you can't just leave the notebook there and never come back. So I like to put something on my calendar. On Friday at three o'clock, I'm going to go back and reevaluate this week's test. I'm going to go back to that testing journal and write everything down. Once you have several tests, you want to share these things, share them with your team. Freak, reach out and share them with me. Anything cool that you learned about your audience, or your offers or pain points, or messaging, these are all valuable things. These are hard fought victories. You need to remember them and share them so that you can then go and create new offers that take advantage of it. New ad copy that takes advantage of those learnings. And then you'll have higher performance from then on out. So I can't encourage you enough. Definitely make sure that you're keeping a testing journal so you can make sure that you are taking advantage of all of your learnings. Alright, 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. AJ Wilcox 39:32 Alright, here's our resources from this episode. First of all, Chris Dayley, you'll see down in the show notes, we have links to his website, his Twitter and his LinkedIn. You'll also see the link to my profile as well so you can follow me for when we come up with that really cool LinkedIn Ads, test evaluation tool, whatever we want to call it something that calculates statistical significance ongoing over time. You'll also see the links to two different statistical significance calculators. One on Investopedia and one run on HubSpot as well as the link to LinkedIn advice for how to optimize and run tests. If you are new to LinkedIn Ads, or if you have a colleague who is definitely check out the link to the LinkedIn Learning course that I did with LinkedIn. It's by far the least expensive and the highest quality of any LinkedIn Ads course out there to date. Look down at your podcast player right now, whatever you're listening on, and make sure you hit that subscribe button, especially if you want to hear more of this in the future. If you hated this, I don't know why you're still listening. But yeah, you probably don't have to subscribe, but I hope you do anyway. Please rate and review the podcast and anyone that who reviews will give you a shout out live on air. And of course with any feedback, any questions about the podcast, suggestions, you can reach out to us at our email address Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.   Show Transcript Account Based Marketing with LinkedIn ads. Exactly what to do for the best results. Coming right up 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. So Account Based Marketing is hot in the B2B sphere. There are so many different companies with ABM offerings, and it's literally become a buzzword in the B2B community. It's really interesting to me because LinkedIn Ads has had the ability to target specific companies with ads since it debuted in 2008. It continues to be, in my opinion, by far the best way to do Account Based Marketing. So on this episode, we're going to go over exactly what ABM is, and how to do it effectively with LinkedIn. We'll also cover what sort of content and offers work well, and the basics of how to segment your campaigns. Make sure to listen all the way to the end, as I'm going to be sharing my top five favorite ABM tactics. Okay, jumping into the news here, you may have noticed that banner at the top of account manager letting you know that there's going to be a new left hand navigation for campaign manager. Well, we got it on some of our accounts and I was pleased to report, since we talked about this in last week's news, that is actually pretty cool. A new addition here is under assets, there's asset history. And that's kind of cool. We haven't had any sort of historical record keeping of anything in the accounts up to this point. So I'm excited to see that. Something else that I really liked about it is it removed the extra step of switching between accounts, which we obviously as an ad agency, who is running LinkedIn Ads, and we're running a lot of them, it's quite a pain to back out of an account and then go back into another one. Well, now it's a very quick click to stay right within campaign manager and just switch accounts. Alright, let's jump into ABM. Let's hit it. 2:00 So first off, I think we have to define what ABM or Account Based Marketing is, because it really has become a buzzword and it's something that CMOs and other marketing professionals throw around, and may not actually know what it means or how it applies to their own marketing efforts. So by my own definition, Account Based Marketing, or Account Based Targeting, or Account Based Sales, it all revolves around the same idea that we are targeting specific companies by name. The way you can think about this is a company can go out and try to acquire as many customers as they want., but Account Based Marketing is all about saying, well, actually, we know a handful or more than a handful of the companies who would be perfect for us, they would be our ideal customers. In that case, you could have a separate effort where you're going after those handful of excellent ideal customers, while still trying to attract the majority of the other accounts, while still trying to attract other business from the rest of the industry. In our case, we specialize in the largest and most involved in highest spending accounts on the LinkedIn Ads platform. And so we know who a handful of those larger players are that we would love to get to work on their accounts. So of course, we want to show ads specifically to them, because any one of those would be a fantastic partnership for us. So my question to you is, who should be doing Account Based Marketing? For me, for a long time I've been telling people, not everyone should advertise on LinkedIn. For some companies, the costs are just too high to make it profitable for them. For instance, if you're a SaaS software that selling for, you know, $100 a month and you don't have contracts, it's likely going to take a long time to recoup any sort of investment. And it may not be possible to show a return on your investment on LinkedIn. But as Account Based Marketing is concerned, I actually do think that every B2B company should be doing it. Because no matter what you do, chances are there are a handful or, like I said more than a handful of companies who would make perfect customers for you. And even if everyone is paying exactly the same amount for your software, you can imagine that there are some brands that would be so worthwhile to have as customers. You could show their logo, you could do case studies about them and leverage their logo, their brand presence, to help elevate your own brand. So you might be willing to take a loss on your advertising, just to bring a brand like that in because it brings all of that credibility, and additional social proof that will help you get a lot more deals in the future. Chances are though, if you're listening, you've already been using LinkedIn Ads and so adding on an ABM element to your campaigns isn't going to be that huge of an addition. And in fact, you're probably already doing it. So let's dive in a little bit deeper. So like I mentioned, back in 2008, LinkedIn let us target specific companies by name. This is back when they had 1000 audience minimum for any sort of advertising. Thank goodness since been lowered down to 300. But even then, as we're talking about ABM, you'll see this is still pretty restrictive. And the way this has always worked is when you go down to select your different audience attributes, you'll see company name is one of the ways that you can target and it's always been this way. In fact, it still is, if you go look for it. And this is great. We still use this quite regularly. The challenge, though, is that, when you use this targeting feature, you're only able to target up to 200 accounts at a time. So let's say that you had an account list of maybe it's the fortune 500. Well, because you can only target 200 companies at a time through this, you'd have to have three separate campaigns. Campaign one targeting the fortune 200, campaign two targeting 201 through 400, and then the third campaign that's targeting just the last 100. You could see how this would be a little bit of a pain to manage and in fact, we've done this for a long time. But luckily for us, back in 2017 LinkedIn released what they called matched audiences. What this allowed us to do is actually upload a list of either individuals that we want to be able to target on LinkedIn or we can upload company names as a list. With this list upload, now we can upload up to 300,000 rows. So you might ask me, AJ, why would you ever want to manually input those company names into a campaign? Well, there are a couple benefits. And this is, of course, if you want to target fewer than 200 companies at a time, then I would still recommend this. And there are two reasons for this. The first is when you manually input them, any suggestion that LinkedIn gives you, it already has a 100% match rate. So if you start typing the name of a company, and it pops up, you are targeting that company, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. Whereas with the list upload, you always have to worry a little bit about your match rate and did you put it in the way that LinkedIn wanted to see it, and you won't know until you upload it. The second benefit here is that you'll be able to start targeting that company immediately. Whereas if you upload a list, chances are you won't be able to start using that for about 72 hours. And trust me, I know LinkedIn says it will take a maximum of 48 hours. But in our experience, it is 72 hours. Please fix that. So if I'm ever targeting a list of fewer than 200 companies, I'm probably going to want to input them manually and that's a huge pain. So you might be thinking, AJ, you're crazy, don't do that. Well, I really only have to do it once. Because once you've ever entered 200 of anything, you can always save that audience for later. And then you can go and apply that in any other campaign that you want to. So yeah, it's a pain to put it in once, but once it's in there, you can reuse it again in the future. The other thing is, once you've uploaded a list, you have like 30 to 90 days basically to use that list in your advertising, otherwise, LinkedIn forgets the list. It's a bit of a pain, you have to go back and reupload the list, wait another 72 hours for it to finish processing, and only then can you use it. So working with lists on LinkedIn is really frustrating. But of course, if you're doing a lot of Account Based Marketing, it really is nice to have these lists uploaded and ready to go. 8:29 So if you want to upload your first list, what you do is if you're on the old UI, you'll go to Account Assets, and then Matched Audiences. If you're under the new UI, the new left hand navigation, it'll be under Plan Matched Audiences, you then select Create Audience and then you decide whether you want to do a Company List or a Contact List. Both of them will have a template that you can download into Excel. So because we're talking about ABM here, we're going to talk just about company lists. But of course, contact lists are also great, very much deserving of their own episode. After you download that template, open it in Excel and you'll get to see all of the different headings of the columns that LinkedIn will accept. And so right now, at the time of recording, we have company name, we have domain name like the website URL, we have the email domain, we have company page URL - the URL for how to find this company on LinkedIn, we have stock symbol if they're a public company, industry, city, state, country and zip code. And of course, if you have company page URL, that's probably going to match it 100%. I can't imagine how LinkedIn would not match that, but if you don't just magically have that information from your data source, we found that company name and domain tends to work pretty well here. Then you can upload that CSV file and then wait for like I said, 72 hours until it finishes processing, and then all of a sudden, it will be ready to use in your account and you can start actually advertising to these people. So now that you have this list, you have to go in and create a campaign, or edit a campaign to start using this list. So what you do is when you're in the campaign settings, you scroll down to the targeting criteria. And you'll notice that the first one says, audiences. When you click audiences, there will be list upload and then you'll see company or contact list. Click on the one of your choice and you should see the list that you've uploaded in this list. Alright, so a quick pro tip, you actually don't have to wait until your audience is totally done processing to associate it to a campaign. We know until that list has finished processing, the campaign won't run. But you could still build the campaign and get it associated here so that as soon as it finishes processing, like the second, all of a sudden the campaign will be running. It could save you some time. I will mention here that it's really important to understand that there are two different things you can do with these lists. You can associate a list as either an inclusion or an exclusion on a campaign. And we'll talk a little bit later about why this is important, but it is my firm belief that because of LinkedIns great targeting capabilities, Account Based Marketing is just as much about exclusion as it is about inclusion. Okay, so you've uploaded this company list into your match audiences section. If you go back to your matched audiences section, and you click on the name of that list, once it's done processing, you now have a very powerful dashboard. But we'll get into that a little bit later. What I want to call your attention to is right there at the top, you will see two tabs, one says Matched and it will show a number, the other ones will say Unmatched and show you a number. So I'm looking at a list right now in my account where it says Matched 274, Unmatched 1. So if I click that unmatched tab, it'll now show me the companies that I uploaded as a row in my list that LinkedIn didn't know who they were. So if that's a really important company to me, I can go and recreate a new list and make sure I get it right this time. I could even go to LinkedIn search for that company, get the URL for the company page, and then upload it again. I'm sure that's going to clear and get me 100% match rate. Okay, so now that you know how to do this, we get to start talking about the actual theory here, that strategy about what you're going to do with these lists and how to structure your Account Based Marketing effort or campaigns. First off, you really need to decide how you're going to segment these companies. I mentioned before that you have to have at least 300 people in an audience for LinkedIn to let you run that campaign. So let's say that there's one company that you want to specify, you may even want to call out to that company in the ads, like, hey, IBM, we have a solution for you. Well, as long as there are at least 300 people at that company that you want to see your ads, then you're good to go. You could create an entire campaign focused just on the company IBM and layer your targeting on top. But let's say you're just targeting marketers who are VP and above, well, I know IBM, and this example is a large company, but I don't think that they have more than 300 VPS or above of marketing and so you may have to combine this campaign with other company names. Maybe it's a handful, maybe it's a 1000 other companies, who knows, but you do need to make sure that you get at least 300 people in an audience in order to advertise. So depending on the size of the company, and the number of potential prospects at each of those companies, you can do the math and figure out if you can do this one to one where it's a whole company per campaign, or if you have to include multiple companies in your campaign. If you can do that one to one, it is amazing, because like I mentioned, you could call out to that company in the ad copy and we know that if you call out to accompany in the ad copy, it's going to perform well. Everyone likes to see their company mentioned in their newsfeed. And of course, you'll want to segment your audiences, usually by something. I mean, if you have to combine multiple company names per campaign, you'll probably want to have some sort of a logical grouping there. So for instance, you might have a group of large companies versus full enterprise size, or you might have a list of local companies, you might have a list of companies that are warm, versus a list of companies that are cold. However you decide to organize your lists. You'll want to upload those lists separately and keep track of and because you're likely already advertising on LinkedIn, you have a bunch of other campaigns. What I would do is I would put the term ABM or list or something like that, in all of the campaign names here. And what this does is if you ever want to check the performance of your Account Based Marketing campaigns, you can just go into the search box inside of campaign manager, and type ABM, or type list. And immediately, it'll show you all of your results. Pretty cool. I get asked a lot about, hey, how large should my audiences be when I'm using ABM. You know, if I'm telling you how to run an evergreen campaign on LinkedIn, I'm going to tell you that my preferred audience sizes are between about 20,000 - 80,000. And really, the only risk to having a small audience is it's probably just not going to spend very much. But if it's worth your effort to create it, it's probably worth running. This definitely applies to ABM campaigns. If I have a whole bunch of campaigns that are targeting 300 people, I'm okay with that. I know it's a lot to manage., if you had an account with like 1,000 campaigns, all targeting, let's say the fortune 1,000, that would be a lot to manage. That's a lot of campaigns for sure. But of course, we're talking about small audiences, which aren't going to spend very much, and it's probably never going to get out of control and be impossible to manage. So the moral of the story here is don't worry too much about having too small of an audience size. When you're doing Account Based Marketing, it's kind of the point to have a very focused audience that you can show to. I've noticed a lot of advertisers will go and upload a list and then they'll try to target job titles at that list of companies. And what you need to understand is that job titles are way, way too exclusive to use for ABM, usually. And that's because LinkedIn only understands about 30% of job titles out there. So it means you're probably going to be ignoring the 70% of your audience that's at each one of those companies, which is not in your favor. I mentioned, don't worry about your audiences being too small, well, it's still a good thing to make sure you're hitting as many people at your target company that are a good fit for your message as possible. So my favorite way to do this, if I can, if this makes sense, is on top of the company list, I'm going to layer on job function and seniority. And this is the most broad way of targeting a persona. But of course, if job function is too broad, you can always narrow in by skill. Skill is the next most broad, and I found that to work quite well. So you could do skill with seniority to get the highest number of your target audience at that company to be included in your targeting. I also get asked a lot about, hey, I'm doing Account Based Marketing, but it doesn't seem to be working, what could be going on? And what I want you to understand is that just because you're doing Account Based Marketing and going after specific accounts, doesn't mean that your performance is actually going to improve. In fact, if your ABM audience is a cold audience to begin with, they don't know you exist, they've never heard of your tool or your company or anything like that, they're still going to be a cold audience, which means they're going to act cold. And on top of that, usually an ABM list is full of larger companies, these big fish or whales, and I know many of our listeners represent these companies. When you're at a giant company, you just have people trying to solicit you trying to sell you all the time. It's so so annoying when I've been in that position. So that means that when you're going after these large companies specifically, you might see your performance drop just because a) they're cold and b) they're tired of being sold to. But this could work in your favor, because it would be exactly the same thing for your competitor. So it leaves a wide opening for you to go in being creative and being strategic. So once you've segmented your companies by list, let's say we're doing something like public companies versus non public, or early stage startups versus medium to large, however you're doing this, you need to decide what sort of offers and what sort of ads you want to show to them. You could decide to do like, hey, we don't have a contact at this company yet so we're gonna show gated content to them and try to find at least one contact per one of these companies to then be able to reach out to. Or you might say, this list of accounts that we're going after, our sales team is actively trying to get in with them, so maybe we're going to show them ungated content, maybe it's a blog post, maybe it's a case study, maybe it's a guide or something that's just purely ungated because you want as many people from that company to consume your content and keep your company top of mind. You get to decide what your priority is there. One way that we've done this in the past is you have different lists for different stages of the funnel. So for instance, you might have a list of company names, who were leads, let's say last quarter, and never closed. You might have a different list who were leads that were generated from this quarter who haven't closed yet. So you could upload these lists into two different campaigns, and give them nurture in whichever way that you would find most beneficial. Of course, that can be a lot of work to manage the lists you have by what stage of the funnel they're in. Then you end up having to compare these Excel sheets between quarters and figure out who dropped off of that list or who's been added to it so that you can re upload those lists to LinkedIn and start using them again. 20:33 So if that sounds like way too much work for you, what I would suggest doing is using a flighting strategy. And the way flighting works is you have an entire audience that you're going to show a specific offer or specific ads for a certain amount of time. And then once you feel like you've probably saturated that audience enough, you can turn those ads and offers off and launch something new. So this is kind of like time based retargeting. But we're not relying on LinkedIn to put people into an audience to target them with ads later, we're showing a unified message to our prospects for a certain amount of time and then we move on and tell them a different story, or update them, take them a little bit further down the funnel. But of course, this isn't nearly as precise. And the reason why is because you could theoretically flight ads for let's say three weeks and maybe there's a big chunk of your audience, let's say 10%, who never even logged in during those three weeks. And so chances are some will come in and log in for the first time during your flighting on your second or your third flight. Flighting is the strategy that TV advertisers and radio advertisers have been using for years and years. It definitely works. It's less precise. But hey, maybe that's okay. 21:52 Your other option is actually to create an automated funnel by using LinkedIn retargeting. Well, we know that your minimum audience size is 300, to even start showing a campaign and so that means in order to even have a second step to your funnel, you've got to get at least 300 people to take an action. With an ABM campaign where your audience sizes are small to begin with, it could take a lot of time to actually build out that audience. I like the idea of using flighting strategy to begin with while you're building those retargeting audiences, and then once those are built significantly, then you could switch your strategy over and use an automated funnel, where you're targeting the group of your audience and then any of those who have taken some sort of an action, then they're removed from that audience and instead, they're targeted in a separate campaign where you're just targeting people who have taken that action. I hope that's clear. Alright, here's a quick sponsor break. And then we'll actually dive into the bidding the budgeting and limitations of Account Based Marketing on LinkedIn. 22:55 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Aads experts. 23:05 If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $150 million on LinkedIn Ads, and no one outperforms us on getting you the lowest cost per lead and the most scale. We're official LinkedIn partners and you'll only deal with LinkedIn Ads experts from day one. So fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com o chat about your campaigns, We'd absolutely love to get to work with you. 23:32 Alright, let's jump into the nitty gritty here. So first off with bidding and budgeting on ABM campaigns, you don't really have to worry too much about a budget, assuming that these are a small audience size. Remember any audience on LinkedIn that you choose, let's say the number looks big, let's say has 20,000 people in it. Well, we know that not every one of those people is going to be logged on to LinkedIn on any given day. And then if you're running sponsored content, you'd be lucky if 1% of those people clicked on your ad. So most of your ABM campaigns, assuming a small audience size, probably aren't going to spend very much, but it's probably a good idea to give them a little bit of wiggle room, set your budgets kind of high just in case. So that's your budgeting, and you just kind of want it out of the way so it doesn't stop your efforts in the midday. But with bidding, you have two different options here. You can either use LinkedIn automated bidding, or maximum delivery, or you can do manual CPC bidding. Both of them can work well. I would just suggest if you are doing manual bidding, you'll want to bid pretty high, like pretty aggressively, because if you can imagine you've got a list of very high value companies here. But of course, the people at those companies are also part of a whole bunch of other marketers lists. Some of them probably have really high performing ads, really good offers. And so in order to win out and have your select few people get shown the ad over one of your competitors. you'll need to make it worth LinkedIn's while. And if you've been listening to me for a while, you probably know that I usually recommend bidding either at the low end of the recommended range, or even significantly below it. But with ABM campaigns, I kind of flip the script and I'll start out by bidding on the high end of the suggested range. Like I mentioned, with the limitations of building any audience on LinkedIn, you have to have at least 300 audience members in order for the campaign to run. So that does make it pretty hard to customize messaging right to an individual company. But if you do want to do that, sponsored messaging ads will let you insert what LinkedIn calls macros. It's dynamic messaging, where you can insert the person's company name, right into the content of the ad. So if sponsored messaging is a good ad format for you, then it can work really well for ABM because you could have a list that you're targeting of 1,000 different companies, but the ad will still show up and say, Hey, we love marketers at IBM, and whatever company they represent, they'll see it in the ad, could be very cool. One of the biggest limitations, though, to using LinkedIn for your ABM efforts, is of course, that you're probably not going to reach these folks outside of when they're on LinkedIn. So if you want to get in front of them around the whole web, yeah, you'll probably have to use one of the many ABM vendors out there, and they can work well. But if you're okay, just hitting them while they're on LinkedIn, you're in luck. Because of that, I also do recommend using LinkedIn Audience Network on any of your ABM campaigns because at least then you'll have a chance at showing them on other sites other than just LinkedIn. You'll reach them a little bit more often, which is cool. And I mentioned that there are quite a few ABM specific vendors out there. And they have a lot of limitations compared to LinkedIn. Of course, the cool part is that they can reach your audience on other ad inventory outside of just waiting for them to come to LinkedIn, which obviously people don't spend a ton of time on LinkedIn on average, but they do have quite a few limitations. Like for instance, they're trying to identify companies by the IP address that they're visiting from. So you could imagine, yeah, for large companies, where if an IP address is communicating, it's coming from one building on a Microsoft campus somewhere. And yeah, you could say, chances are that's coming from Microsoft. But what about all those users who still work for the company, but they're using their mobile phone on the subway, or walking around the city, and they're not on Wi Fi, you lose them there. And then quite a few of these companies also rely on cookies. And we've had this conversation before in previous episodes, where cookies are just really scary right now, because they're going away. So if you're relying on a cookie, tying someone's identity together, you're going to lose that data eventually. I'm going to read off a few of these Account Based Marketing Tools, or platforms. I'm sure these will sound familiar to a lot of you. Across all of our accounts, we've managed, we've gotten a chance to use the vast majority of these platforms. We've used Terminus, we've used Metadata, we've used 6sense, Demandbase, Engagio and they all have their own technology, their own pros and cons so it's definitely worth checking them out. And obviously, I'm a little bit of a LinkedIn nut. So you can take anything I say with a grain of salt here, but I just haven't found any of these ABM vendors that can beat native LinkedIn advertising. Of course, the downside is you're always waiting for them to come back to the platform. If they're not spending a whole lot of time there, you may need to reach them on other platforms. So more often than not, this is a combined strategy of run this on LinkedIn, as well as on one of these other ABM vendors. When you're using one of these ABM vendors, though, you probably want to make sure you have a pretty significant size of lists of companies in order to really make it make sense because they're going to charge you a minimum fee just to work with them. Then of course, the ad inventory itself, because they're showing across like the Google Display Network, for instance, it's not all that expensive. In order to make it worthwhile, you do want to a pretty large list. So before I mentioned that when you click on the name of the company upload list, that there's a dashboard, and this dashboard, I don't know what to call it other than I call it like an ABM Performance Dashboard. What it does is it shows you all of the companies that you've uploaded, along with their performance from your ads, and it's going to always show this to you for your last 90 days combined. There are two different ways that you can break this down. The first is Engagement and the second is Details. So if you click on the Details break down, it's just going to show you all of the details about that company that you uploaded. It'll show you things like company name, industry, company size date added, domain, etc. This isn't a source of information where LinkedIn gives you a readout. They're only going to give you something here if that's what you uploaded. So if you didn't upload stock symbols or the company's domains, it's not going to give it to you back. Probably, what you're going to find the most interesting here is engagement. Under the engagement drop down, it's going to show you the company name, it's going to show you an engagement level by how engaged LinkedIn thinks this company is with your ads, the number of members from that company targeted, the number of campaigns they're targeting that company, the number of impressions that that company was served, and ad engagement, like a click through rate combined from that company. There's even organic engagement, because LinkedIn obviously knows how many people from that company are engaging with your company page, or even your ads, because they've been shared by one of their coworkers. And finally, there's website visits, which website visits is only going to show if you have the insight tag installed on your website. And of course, your users have a cookie on their browser that's identifying them as who they are on LinkedIn, to LinkedIn. That's obviously going away with cookies, going to death. So this is a very cool dashboard. It's something that LinkedIn hasn't made a whole lot of noise about, but I absolutely love this. If you're using company name lists in your match audiences, go check this out now and take a look. See if you can see which companies are really loving your ads, which just haven't been reached by them, and you've got to find them a different way. 31:36 Okay, I mentioned at the beginning that I was going to share with you my five favorite strategies for running ABM campaigns. I'm actually going to throw in a sixth, a little bonus strategy here. So number one, I love to go to the sales teams of our clients, and ask them to give us a list of their sales dream accounts. The companies that they would absolutely love to work with. And of course, it's really not hard to combine all of these lists from a whole bunch of different sales reps, combine them into one list and then you can upload that. Now all of a sudden, sales feels like, hey, marketing is trying to get us what we're asking for. And now sales and marketing, they used to butt heads, but now they're holding hands and singing Kumbaya. It's a great thing. Strategy number two, I actually like to upload a list of competitors names, and then exclude that across all of my campaigns. And what that does, is even if I'm not specifically doing ABM targeting, I'm taking my competitors out of the running here using the company name exclusions. And now my competitors have no idea what it is I'm doing. They're not being shown my ads, they can't click on them to charge me money, etc. My third strategy here is actually along the same vein, instead of your competitors, it's taking your list of customers, and excluding them because your customers are already paying you money. You don't need to pay to show them ads anymore. That'll save you some money, because your customers probably will click. Strategy number four is actually taking that same customer list and showing ads to them intentionally. Here's an idea of when that would be appropriate. So let's say you have a list of customers who their contract is going to be up in the next three months and they're going to be reevaluating if they want to be still signed up, still subscribing to whatever your SaaS software is. Well, now you can target them with product updates and information about the roadmap, what's coming out for your tool, what it's going to be able to do, what new functionality you'll have, all of that. Because they're seeing that, chances are they're going to get excited, or at least a lot more energized about being a customer of yours and when it comes time for renewal, you should see a much lower churn rate. Strategy number five, we actually touched a little bit on, you take a list of all of your leads for a certain amount of time who have been generated as a lead, but haven't yet moved to the next stage in the funnel, or haven't yet closed as a deal. So you could take that list of companies and show ads to them. What I like about this is you don't have to just show ads to the people who were leads of yours, you know that that person is part of a larger buyer committee usually. So now you can broaden your targeting quite a bit and you can try to reach everyone in that company who could be part of that buyers committee. So for instance, if you're trying to sell a tool to a marketer, well, you know, they probably have other coworkers who might be lending a hand or helping in that decision. You might have someone in finance, this deal is going to cross their desk and they've got to sign off on it. If it's small companies, the CEO probably needs to sign off on it or be convinced. So if you can show ads and keep top of mind for everyone in the buyers committee, when it comes time to actually sign you'll get a lot more oh, I've heard of these guys before, they must be legit and signing off versus "Wait, what tool are you trying to buy?" and getting added scrutiny. You don't want that. And here's my bonus strategy, strategy number six. You probably have a list of leads that you've generated. And let's say that you have all of their company email addresses. Well, you want to take my advice here, like when I talked about how you want to target the whole set of decision makers. But if these are a list of individuals, you're not going to be able to do that very well. Well, what we do is we'll take that contact list, and inside of Excel will extract a column for just their company email domain and then we can go and upload that to LinkedIn as a company matched audience list, Voila!, you just took a contact list and turned it into a company list and now you can apply all of those targeting filters on top to make sure you're hitting the rest of the buyers committee, or at least their co workers, other people who could help make this decision. All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around. 36:07 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 36:18 All right, here are the resources from this episode. So if you are looking to advertise better on LinkedIn, or you have, let's say, a coworker, or someone else who's trying to learn and get up to speed, make sure you refer them to the LinkedIn Learning course that I did with LinkedIn on LinkedIn Ads. The link is right down below in the show notes. It's really easy. It is by far the least expensive and the best course out there. Also, if this is your first time listening, look down at your podcast player and hit that subscribe button on whatever player you're listening on. And please do rate and review the podcast. If you rate, of course, we love to see five stars. It helps other people who are also ad managers on LinkedIn get to hear about the podcast. Anything you have to say please leave it in a review and we'd love to shout you out here on air as well. With any questions you have or topic suggestions, anything like that, you can reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. 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: Email the guest: jon@shape.io Coupon Code on Shape.io: B2 NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.   Show Transcript AJ Wilcox Managing budgets on LinkedIn Ads is so hard. Help! Well, not when you're using one specific tool. Stay tuned to hear all about it on this 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. So the LinkedIn Ads partner ecosystem is still pretty thin, especially when we compare it with those super robust partner ecosystems across all the other ad platforms. So we want to start shining a spotlight on some of the most valuable and useful tools that us advertisers can get used to and get to use for better performance. Today's episode is covering a LinkedIn Ads tool that you may not have heard of, Shape.io. It's a tool for budget reporting, budget prediction, and even budget management. It's a very niche offering, but the things that it does, it does very, very well and it's priced very reasonably. Most advertisers I've talked to haven't heard of the tool, so I wanted to introduce it a little bit to you. Now this episode is not meant to be an ad for Shape.io. I'm a longtime user, for sure, and I do gush a bit in the episode about just how useful we found the app. The recommendations that I make here, though, are my own and shape didn't compensate us to be featured here. Alright, with that out of the way. Let's jump into the interview with Jon. AJ Wilcox All right, Jon Davis. Jon is a co-founder of Shape. He spent seven years as a PPC consultant, an agency analyst, and a department manager before leaving to build useful apps for other PPC analysts. The origins of shape come from problems Jon saw firsthand in our industry, he focuses on product direction, customer service, and sales for the company. Jon, anything I missed here in the intro? Jon Davis Yeah, well, AJ, first off, thanks a lot for having me, I'd say a little, maybe just a little bit more about where our company is Bend, Oregon. Really cool town, if you're into mountain biking, or skiing, snowboarding. Or if you'd like to play golf, like I do golf more my favorite hobbies. I've got two little boys that are four and six years old, that take up a lot of my time and not too much else really, truly interesting about me to be honest. My wife is pretty interesting. She is a former professional cyclist for about 10 years. Raced for team USA, has climbed every mountain in Europe on her bike, and has a lot of really cool stories. She ran track at University of Oregon, which is a really big deal for us out here that live in Oregon. So that's a little bit about the personal life and if you want to hear anything really interesting, get my wife on maybe if she ever gets into digital marketing. AJ Wilcox Love it! Well, I can't say any way that I would have like come across your wife because I have not climbed every mountain in Europe. I was just skiing this last weekend. So that is super cool. I will have to make my way up there to Bend. Jon Davis Yeah, we're about let's see from our office here about 25 minutes from the bottom of the lift at Mount Bachelor, which is our local mountain here that has a lot of great terrain and a little bit of a bummer this year, low on the snow here in Oregon this year. But Bend is a great town to come in the summertime. Really great weather, no humidity. And I could go on and on and sound like a tourist worker for the City of Bend, but if you like high elevation mountain towns, you should come check out Bend for sure. AJ Wilcox I do. I like how high elevation and I especially love the no humidity thing. I'm on my way now. Jon Davis Yeah, I lived in Georgia for about 10 years so I'm ready to never go back to humidity ever again. AJ Wilcox Oh, I get that. Cool. Well, obviously, I want to have you on here as a tool spotlight because Shape is I think the only tool I know of for LinkedIn ads that does what it does. So do you want to tell us a little bit about what the challenges are that advertisers face and how shapes solves them? Jon Davis Sure. First off, I'd be really curious. How would you describe what Shape does? As a customer? Are we allowed to say that? AJ Wilcox Yeah, we totally get you. Okay, so I probably will have said this in the intro. But I've been a longtime user of Shape, right, as soon as you guys got access to LinkedIn's API. I think I was one of the first if not the first user and I'm a big fan. So that being said, yeah. What Shape does it from my experience here is its budget tracking and its budget prediction. You know, for all of our clients, let's say we have 50 clients all advertising right now, at any given time, we can be getting alerts of like, hey, we've spent 48% of our month's budget on like, halfway through the month, and I'll know I'm on track, or we can have it automatically pause campaigns, if it's three days till the end of the month, and we've already spent all of the budget. So it's pretty much an insurance policy against like, spending a client's budget incorrectly. What would you add to that? Jon Davis Yeah, good job. Are you interested in SDR role or anything here at Shape? That's really our focus is budgeting and helping PPC analysts budget at scale. My background, like you said is in PPC, working as an outside consultant to agency analysts to managing a department of eight analysts at an agency and my background was working specifically in industries like self storage, multifamily housing, senior living communities. Our clients had lots of different budgets in lots of different places, all with managers at that apartment community that had a vested interest in how their budget was being spent. They had a lot of stakeholders. One thing I always say is, nobody has overspent more PPC budgets than me and my career back when I was an analyst. I got promoted to a manager role, but was still trying to manage budgets, and was over my head and things were slipping through the cracks. For me, it always felt like man, this shouldn't be this hard. And that is, you know, really where Shape tries to step in and help. The first version of shape was really focused on, like you were saying, just a pure alerting out to you, hey, you're about to run out of your budget, here's an email alert. Phase two of shape was allowing you to from the interface, when you got that alert went in, saw, oh, man, I need to pause these campaigns, or I need to raise the budget, whatever it is to do that right from Shape and be able to push those edits. So to move out from just being that reporting and alerting tool and then the phase that we're still living in today with Shape is to do a lot of that through automations and layering different automations on there, if you choose. So let's say you've got a PPC client with a $500 a month budget, you've got 10 campaigns across Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, all these places, feeding off that $500 budget, link those campaigns into that budget and when our system detects, you've hit that $500, like you see, will shut those campaigns down, pause them for the rest of the month, wait either to the beginning of the next month, or for more budget to be added and turn those campaigns back on. So really automating a lot of that manual work. I've seen every budgeting spreadsheet template you could imagine working in this space over the years and there's just no substitute for software coming in checking it every hour, every half hour for spend providing predictions, like you say, to help you kind of predict where you're going as well. We really primarily sell to agencies because they're facing that scale problem more than an in house team. We have a few in house customers, which we say are like in house teams with agency dynamics. So maybe they have a lot of franchises they're managing or something like that. But for us, really, we found that PPC agencies are where we have the most product market fit and where people find the most value. Our original name was Steady Budget, before we change to Shape and rebranded. So we've really been focused on budgeting since we released this product. AJ Wilcox Alright, so this might be leading the witness a little bit, but I'm curious to hear from you. Why is this an important problem to solve? What's the downsides or risks to overspending a budget? Jon Davis Sure. Yeah, I speak from my experience as an analyst. I knew the client would like kind of care maybe about what the cost per click was, I knew they at least have some interest in click through rate to see like how well their ads were responding. But I knew for sure, they cared about how much they spent at the end of that month, or the end of that cycle. And so for me, budgeting has always been one of those core things that really, clients are really focused on. I've really view a lot of PPC really kind of circles around three main pillars. There's the client, there's the analyst that they've hired, and there's the budget that they both agreed to. And that budget, client, customer, analyst relationship is one that kind of rotates around almost every PPC campaign, I think out there and by kind of like keeping that at the core and organizing all your data in Shape around those budgets, I think it works really well for agencies that that's really the first goal, okay, let's make sure we spend the budget accurately. You've got that confidence with your client and customer that hey, they said they're gonna spend $600 bucks they spend $600 bucks, we can trust them to do that. Now let's focus on more deeper agency client relationship things through communication and writing new ad copy and getting new test set up. AJ Wilcox I love it. I just want to add on to that. When I very first started B2Linked as an ad agency, I went out and I had to get business insurance and looked at all kinds of different insurances. I realized the most important thing, the worst thing that I could end up doing to a client is overspending their budget. This is spending money that they did not give us permission to spend. So I talked to several insurance agents at the time, not a single one of the policies I was looking at would cover overspending. So I realized I am on my own, it only took one overspending a client's budget before I went, Ah, I get this. This leaves me legally liable here. I think I need Shape. Jon Davis Yeah, we've been there too. We've researched the same thing from our end, like, hey, let's say servers went out, stuff that goes crazy early on, and there's a hiccup can we get insurance for that? Really it doesn't exist. Early on in Steady Budget Shape history in 2014-2015, I definitely stayed up at night a little worried about that. Now six, seven years in, if we ever get a support ticket, that's like a Shape overspent by budget or there's, you know, some fire like that that comes up, I know for sure that shape did what it was supposed to do, because that's our number one priority as a software. We have to be that insurance policy and every single time somebody or client or customer comes to us, you know, they believe in overspend occurred in Shape, it's every single time user error, or some setting they didn't get changed maybe the way they were supposed to. We really view that as our responsibility to help educate them on that, but from our perspective, I now sleep soundly knowing that we pause the campaigns when we're supposed to pause them, we turn them on when we're just supposed to turn them on. The code is as bulletproof as it could possibly be because we are out there. You know, we're out on the limb saying we're not going to overspend these budgets. Shape processes over a billion dollars a year in ad spend for our customers. And I promise you, we don't have a billion dollars in our bank account right now to potentially cover that overspend. So one thing that we believe 100% is the logic is rock solid because it has to be. AJ Wilcox Very cool. One technical question I've got for you. I wonder how much will Shape allow a campaign or an account to overspend? And also having API access to LinkedIn Ads myself, I know that the API is kind of weak, it's limited, at least in the past, LinkedIn has limited us to say, you are not allowed to request the same information more than four times per day or something. So realizing that you can only inquire from LinkedIn's API every so often, how much exposure does that allow you or kind of force Shape to not have noticed and overspend since the last time it requested? Jon Davis Sure, yeah, the good thing is working with them like on the tech side as a software provider, that's then going to license your software out to other providers, as you get a little different parameters and a little bit more often than maybe, you know, going as an individual through the API for your own account. So we have the ability, we're pulling in to make sure that no overspends occur. On a platform like LinkedIn where you're seeing pretty high cost per clicks and, you know, if you get a setting wrong, you can get away from you quick, we're able to really check on that spend at least once an hour through the day. AJ Wilcox Great. Is there any sort of logic to say, it looks like we're getting close to a budget so we're gonna start checking more often? We're gonna check every 15 minutes rather than every hour? Jon Davis Yeah, great question. And we do. So as we like, see that percentage of budget remaining kind of tightening up it, those types of budgets will float a little higher up into the queue priority that we have run it through and our logic that's just constantly churning through all the budgets on our platform. So we're trying to check that a little more often as we can as it gets kind of down closer. The other thing is, we've got a lot of previous data on how rapidly the those campaigns can spend so we can make a judgment around, okay, well, we don't have to start dialing up that check just yet, because we got a really good feel for how much this is going to spend based on historical data and with some of our automations we've got a little built in buffer on the underspend side of a couple percent, to make sure that if we err one way or another, we're going to make sure we under spend that budget by a percent or half percent then over spend it by a percent or half percent. AJ Wilcox I love it. That's fantastic. We've mentioned a little bit about this, but tell us about your relationship with LinkedIn, as well as the other ad platforms. Who do you support? What's your relationship like all that? Jon Davis Well, my personal relationship with LinkedIn is mostly as a user, somebody out there trying to promote my B2B software, putting How To videos up. It's really been, for our company, one of our most powerful channels to getting new product releases out there, getting some engagement on videos. I've run LinkedIn campaigns for myself and others and have some experience in there, but my primary professional background is with Google Search Ads. That's where I spent the majority of my career before leaving to work on software to solve PPC problems. I graduated college in 2006. In about mid 2007 was learning more about, I was in marketing, I was working in sales making 100 outbound calls a day. I thought hmmm, it'd be a lot easier if people called me and started working on our company website to get optimized for some SEO basics, which back then you could send almost anything to page one with a few easy tweaks, it was a magical time to be in digital marketing. From that time of like 2007, when I realized that these are people searching for products. Here's, you know, this search engine serving up ads for people that want to be shown to those people, it really did feel like magic to me, and I've been in PPC for the last 15 years ever since. So my relationship kind of goes back through the agency world every way you kind of touched the various platforms and Shape in particular, we sync with Google, Microsoft, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, along with the Facebook, you get instagram along with Google, there's YouTube. So for those real main platforms, we go really deep with our integrations, there may be other PPC platforms out there or reporting platforms that have 500 data connections with every possible place, you can imagine pulling in a piece of data, we've really honed in on the top five, eight places that be placing ads for your clients and focused on really deep integrations with those where instead of just reporting on that data, we're pushing back out a lot of automations to all these platforms that we can. And so I think I've tended to live a lot in the search world, so one of the big reason Shape exists is combining search and social kind of into one budget. You know, a lot of these ad platforms don't have too much incentive to really integrate with other data. I don't think it's going to be too soon to where Google is going to be pulling in LinkedIn data. And LinkedIn is going to be allowing them to make like two way changes on a lot of campaigns through their tool. Through the years, there's maybe like backdoor ways in platforms have done it, and you're seeing Microsoft maybe take some steps. But none of the products are really enterprise or agency scale level, they're really meant to kind of help the individual advertiser manage, you know, a few campaigns, not the agency manage 1,000s of campaigns. So that's where one of the big things that Shape allows you to do is pull in all those campaigns from different places, put it under one client, micro group those in the budgets, and feel really good. You're spending your budget allocation where you want to be spending it. Jon Davis Love it. Any future plans for other platforms, like are you thinking Snap, or TikTok or any of those that you might want to support in the future? Jon Davis Yeah, so we're always getting requests, for sure. Really, that those are, you named a lot of the next big ones that we're looking at. Snap, Pinterest, TikTok are on our list, and really focused on bringing in new types of Google campaigns that they're finally allowing through the API. So really, where we run into more friction with our customers isn't necessarily bring on a new outside, like TikTok type, but not being able to pull in Google campaigns that they don't allow through the API. So up until like six days ago, you couldn't get any local service ads from Google out of their API and now it's just in beta and we're able to run testing. We're also exploring, there's some kind of data aggregation tools out there like Airbyte, and some other places where you can normalize a bunch of data and we could offer a lot more integrations. We're quickly kind of using that as a middleman, but right now Pinterest, TikTok, Snapchat, definitely the ones that we're targeting the most right now in terms of moving into those platforms and really as somebody that thinks a lot about our product direction, that's the one thing I really feel good about is a lot of our feature requests aren't necessarily like, hey, we need shape to do this new thing around budget management, it's more, hey, can you bring in these other campaigns and have them do for us what shape does for these other platforms? AJ Wilcox How mean is that of Google to be like, hey, we'll pass through the API, any information about your spend, except this one ad format, or this one objective? And all of a sudden, you're like, hey, of course, we want to be able to support all this, but the platform itself doesn't let us like, oh, you know, gets my goat. Sorry about that. Jon Davis Yeah, that's right. And that's one thing that we kind of, look at it. And in terms of we like to kind of look at ourselves as sort of a speedometer that can like accept any spend from any platform and give you, you know, the analyst a really good idea of what speed everything's spending at and moving at, and being able to pull in more channels there is key. Without that data feed and without Google allowing everything to be pulled in, you know, it's a struggle for us to add value. But the new Google Ads API know we're focused on LinkedIn, but the new Google Ads API that just has finally come out of beta and has been released has been a real huge thing for third party software's like us. It's been a lot of work to change every single call over to the new ads API, but Google, I think, can be slow to react in this case, they're finally give it understanding that, hey, if these third party software's like ours are supporting these clients, we need to give them the ability to pull all their spend in these tools because they're building workflows and systems around them. AJ Wilcox Totally. Alright, what strategies have you seen advertisers use and see great results because of using Shape? Jon Davis Yeah, I think really, the best way that we help analysts deliver better results is saving them a lot of time budgeting. Time that can be better spent, you know, thinking about how to improve those results, not just how do I spend $22 a day on this campaign or $38 a day? How do I get back on pace? Freeing up that time that you're not exporting a download into Google Sheets, reformatting, emailing, putting a CSV together and emailing out to the customer. Those are really places where we've seen the big savings. Within the app, we've got tools like Budget Pacer, that help people to see maybe opportunities to put more spend into a certain campaign with a lower CPA or a higher return on investment, whatever data you're pulling into Shape. With Budget Pacer, your there's a lot of different tools and dials you can turn to give you sort of like, hey, I want to prioritize CPA or I want to prioritize just raw conversions and get different predictions on what daily budget you should be saying at the campaign level based on those parameters. We see a lot of customers getting great results with Budget Pacer, We will see changes come through that are, you know, so and so changed daily budget to $38.12. And I'm like, Well, I know that was a Budget Pacer change, because I don't think they calculate, you know, $38.12. So we really see good results there from helping people one save a lot of time that they were previously doing manual work out of spreadsheets and workflows that were brutal. You know, as an analyst, I knew like the beginning of the month was always rough for us, because it was like, Okay, this is reporting time, I'm going to go, I'm going to be downloading a bunch of stuff, I'm entering in all these spreadsheets, and, you know, to kind of have a tool that would break that I kind of always wanted when I was in that scenario sort of break out of that kind of cycle and focus on more of the creative side. That's where we've seen the most positive results. And, you know, I think our core feature of pausing campaigns before they overspend is one that kind of eventually gets people don't even think about it anymore. They're they're not even worried about overspending a campaign ever again, where before they came to us a lot of customers that was like you were saying one of their chief concerns that the company was not overspending these budgets they've been trusted with? AJ Wilcox Yeah, I see what you mean by time savings, can't tell you the number of times that past companies, the CMO would come to me and say, Hey, are we on budget? Like, what number are we going to hit by the end of the month? And if I would have had Shape back then, I could have just looked at the graph and said, but instead I had to export everything by day. And, you know, plot spend by day and figure out how many days left in the month and do a trend line to show it. I'm decent at Excel, but I'm not a wizard. So that kind of report might take me 20, 30 minutes to put together whereas Shape tells you exactly what you're shooting towards. So I love that. AJ Wilcox All right, here's a quick sponsor break and then we'll dive right back into Shape. The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. AJ Wilcox If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you, B2Linked as the agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $150 million on LinkedIn Ads, and no one outperforms us on getting you the lowest cost per lead and the most scale. We're official LinkedIn partners. And you'll deal only with LinkedIn Ads experts from day one. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to chat about your campaigns, We'd absolutely love to work with you. All right, now, let's jump back into it. AJ Wilcox What are some of the results that your advertisers have seen in doing business with you? Have you had any like case studies or anecdotal evidence where they come to you and say, Thanks, you saved my bacon? Or this helped us so much? Or what are some of those? Jon Davis Yeah, well, I think, you know, most people out there thinking about LinkedIn are focused on LinkedIn. We've got a case study on our site. I don't know if it's company you've heard of, it's called B2Linked? Haha! When we talked to your team about what was life like before Shape or after Shape? What we really found was like just what we were saying your team estimated about 70% of their time that they previously spent on budgeting, which is hours and hours and hours a week. Now, it's just gone. And what we see really across the board with people that are trying to manage a lot of budgets is once everything's on boarded, set up, immediately, all that time that was spent budgeting is now freed up for other things. It's not uncommon for me to hear from an analyst like, Oh, I've got 10 hours in my week back, 15 hours in a week back. Working with larger agencies, we interact with a lot of accounting teams too that are responsible for reconciling ad platform spend at the end of the month. Just last week, an accountant sent me a thing, it's like we've just on boarded shape and now I need to pick up a new hobby because I don't have to spend as much time in the evenings manually entering ad spend that's getting reported on from PPC. Those are really fun for me to hear, because I was that analyst spending hours a day in Excel. To know that now they're able to think about the landing page they're sending the ads to, think about testing this new Google campaign type, and just pulling it into shape and not worrying that it's going to go crazy spend. Those are the things that I think are really fun about PPC and will keep better and smarter people in the industry for longer. AJ Wilcox Totally. That definitely resounds with me. If we as creative professionals and technical marketers are spending all of our time doing mind numbing, like crap work, busy work, rather than doing what we should be doing, which is developing good offers and good creative and managing the platform. I think it's a great thing. I'm curious. I know Google was famous early on for allowing you to spend more than your daily budget. And now LinkedIn has followed suit, depending on the objective you choose. They can overspend your daily budget by 20 to 100%. Have you found a situation where Shape has caught an overspend and been able to pause it before even the platform itself could do it? Jon Davis Yes. So one of our core features is really based around protecting against just that from the ad platforms. We have a feature called autopilot and there's two different settings on that. The first setting is let's give a budget a $1,000, here's the 10 campaigns. Let's turn on autopilot and let's say it's a monthly budget, we hit the $1,000 this month, turn it off, wait for the first day ofthe next month, turn it back on. Another version of that autopilot is daily autopilot. What that does is it takes the amount of budget you've got left divided by the number of days and sets a daily budget for those campaigns and when we see that daily budget reached, we take action to pause those campaigns within that day, wait for the midnight start of the next day, and then turn it back on. So let's say you've got your daily budget set at $50. Okay, Google and LinkedIn, they were rubbing their hands are like, alright, 50 bucks, that means 100, I'm ready to go. At about, 1:00 or 2:00 in the afternoon, you spent your 50 bucks, Shape comes through does the data update says well, you've hit your daily 50 bucks your campaigns off. Now Google and LinkedIn, they can't spend on a paused campaign for the rest of that day and that's been a really powerful thing for us to offer our customers you know, that gives you the ability to go into LinkedIn and even set just like a lifetime budget. And then make sure you've got daily autopilot involved and you're gonna pace on that daily budget for the life of that budget without needing to change those micro parameters from within LinkedIn along the way. So you can change any type of budget into a daily budget if you want to using those systems And that's again, where we view ourselves as that like speedometer, you're saying, hey, Google, hey, LinkedIn, I only want you to take this car 50 miles per hour, I'm not approving you to go 100 miles per hour, like you say, in your conditions, I want you to go 50 miles an hour, we make sure your cruise controlled to hang right there. Jon Davis That always makes me laugh when platforms act like they can't pause a campaign when it's overspending. Like, oh, we need allowance to spend 20% or 50% or 100% over because, you know, we're gonna throw a whole bunch of ads out there. And we have no idea how many of those are going to get clicked on? Yeah, maybe if you're spending millions of dollars per month, I get it. Like you're gonna have a lot out there. But especially for LinkedIn, where the majority of advertisers I'm guessing, are paying on CPM. It's like, the second your campaign is shown that 1,000th time and you know, it's spent that amount, the platform should be able to stop on a dime. It seems ridiculous, but I'm so glad that there's a tool like Shape that will allow us to override that. Jon Davis Yeah, I can see where the product design is there. And I can see how and why they can genuinely believe that, hey, giving us that freedom will get you better results at the end of this 30 or 60 day period because we've identified something in this moment, that means we should be spending more, but ut I think that doesn't always make it really easy on the analyst communicate that back through to their clients. And I think as clients sometimes are willing to sacrifice maybe that last morsel of performance to have some predictability around what is this gonna spend on a daily basis, when you know, about the same amount is going to be spent at the beginning of the month, that's going to be spent at the end of the month. And I think in a lot of cases, there's still value to that kind of predictability and to be able to set a setting on budget and have the platform stick to that budget should be an option. AJ Wilcox I totally agree. And with Google, I totally expect the platform to be able to say, hey, if we overspend right now we'll get you better performance. And I'm okay with that. I don't even think that LinkedIn does claim that if they overspend your budgets, because it's going to perform well. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's just, we don't have faith in our platform being able to shut it off on time. That's what it seems like to me anyway. Tell me about some of the nuances with budgeting, either with Shape or without on LinkedIn Ads specifically. Like any nuances with the platform that we should know about as advertisers, what can you teach us? Jon Davis Yeah, I mean, I think, from my perspective, I probably have no grand insights there. But I think the one unique thing about LinkedIn versus some of the other platforms is just the sheer cost per click in some scenarios and that can be really challenging when it comes to budget management. If four or five clicks are costing you $10 to $20 a click, especially if you're working with a smaller business, that's a big chunk of change really fast. And, you know, I don't think that's a surprise, obviously, to anybody out there that's been running LinkedIn campaigns, and I think is one of the bigger barriers like to entry for people, you know, making the leap and getting into LinkedIn campaigns. But I think really, what I see in terms of like the nuances around on LinkedIn is just paying a lot of attention to how that bid is affecting your positioning. The magic part for me around LinkedIn is really being able to focus on that bid, get the amount of impressions, make sure you're not like two impressions a day, or 2 million a day, finding that sort of sweet spot in your bids so that you don't necessarily have to always CPA or CPM bid, you can bid more for performance and kind of enter that auction where I think you've got, you know, Google Ads guy in my background, I'm kind of an auction believer, in some cases there. I think if you're able to bid, obviously CPM, you're still involved in that auction somewhere, but you've got a little bit more of a finger on the dial there. So I think being able to kind of set up to make sure you're not overspending and then really kind of hone in where that bid needs to be, is where we see kind of the nuance and LinkedIn over maybe some of the other platforms. AJ Wilcox Oh, very well said. I love that explanation. So what's your favorite aspect of shape? Just some area of the product that you are really excited about or you think makes the biggest difference? Jon Davis For me, I still get really excited about the core thing we set out to solve in 2014, 2015 when we were launching the product, and that is, I've got a budget for this month and within shape, you can set a budget for any duration, it doesn't have to be monthly, it can be a one time, it can be a 17 day recurring budget for whatever crazy reason you might need it, but for me, I still get really excited about the fact that, let's say I set up campaigns, and I set a $500 a month budget, I set those campaigns that could run for the rest of time. and I know it's going to spend $500 a month as long as the volume in those campaigns will get the clicks and Google keeps showing the ads, you know, the quality scores don't go down too low or LinkedIn keeps showing those ads, I know in some ways Shape would just manage that likeRobots should. On, off when it should, pace the budget when it should. That kind of core features still leads every one of our sales calls, it still is the core of a lot of our marketing material that we talk about. I think as we've seen a lot of third party software in our space that started around the 2010 to 2015 zone, they were really focused on optimizing your campaigns and how can you spend your $500 a month more effectively, within the search engines are the ad platforms like LinkedIn, where we kind of thought the market was going back in 2014 2015, was that eventually all the ad networks are going to be way better at all that then third party software would ever be. We need to focus on building solutions where the ad networks weren't as excited about solving those problems, like limiting your budget, or bringing in data from multiple channels into one place. So I think, luckily, we haven't had to chase too much on the product and really just continuing to do our core function of pacing and managing PPC budgets, and removing all the manual work and staying kind of laser focused on that. One thing I've admired about B2Linked has been like your focus as a company and being able to really succinctly kind of say, Hey, we're the best and LinkedIn Ads in the world. That's our Jim Collins hedgehog concept. You know, that's our one thing we do great. I feel really lucky to have a company where I can, you know, say we do PPC budgeting, PPC management, budget management X scale better than any other platform out there. That's been a real focus of ours is to stay in that budgeting world and not chase, you know, the next AI algorithm because Google has, you know, I don't even know 5,000 engineers thinking about exactly that one thing and all the data in the world you could imagine and they're just not going to release enough of that data to third parties for us to make better recommendations than they could. So solving those problems and kind of filling in those cracks that the platform's leave open is something that gets me really excited about Shape. New campaign types getting pulled into shape gets me really excited. Being able to now add a lot of these new Google campaigns as LinkedIn keeps testing new types of campaigns and falls a lot of the same way. I get excited when each of those new campaign types get pulled in there. Because it means people now are pulling it in, not worrying about budgeting, focusing on like, okay, is this campaign type the best place or the best channel for me to be putting my clients money? AJ Wilcox Love it, if I can share my favorite feature? It's the fact that you can create a specific budget. It's not just like, one of our clients per month, we get to know are they going to spend or understand or whatever their budget, but it's the fact that we can group individual campaigns by name and give them their own budgets. So for instance, if we're running ABM campaigns, we could take their three ABM campaigns, group them into one budget on Shape and say, Hey, tell us how we're pacing here. Are we going to spend our ABM budget versus the overall account level budget? So that's one that I think is really cool. I just don't ever see any of the platforms releasing the ability to do this. I feel like you're on solid ground where the platforms aren't going to compete with you to try to take your business. Jon Davis Yeah. And that's been a real conscious decision on our end. And it's another one of the reasons we haven't really chased super in depth like reporting solutions. Instead, we have a one click integration with Data Studio where that's, you know, your reporting place now to go because everybody's working with data studio now. And they've got every little dial you could ever imagine. We'd be coding on just some new reporting dashboard for the next four years to get up to what Data Studio and some of these other tools are doing today. So instead of like fighting the battle on the reporting front, fighting the battle on the optimization front, all areas where big teams, big companies have a lot of incentive playing both those games, we want to be where they don't want to play. And they don't really want to play and project management and building tools to make it easier on a PPC agency to manage a lot of clients, you know, in a lot of the ad platforms mind, you know, the agency is really just a management fee that's taking more ad spend that could be going to the platform. And so a lot of their products aren't designed with the agency in mind. Our third party software, we can design specifically for the agencies and solve problems in that way that we just haven't seen the ad networks really take on that challenge yet. And it makes sense why they wouldn't. Their focus is on building tools so that an individual advertiser feels like you know what, I can run my own LinkedIn Ads campaigns, I don't need to go to be to links and, you know, pay for them. I think it's good enough, I can turn these few dials and LinkedIn will handle it. You know, that's really the problems they're trying to solve and focused on not how do we help B2Linked to manage 10,000 clients at the same time? AJ Wilcox Totally, it doesn't seem like it's in the platform's best interest to give their clients tools like that. I would argue that if you're having a good experience with the platform, if the platform feels like it's taking care of your money, they're a steward of it, that you probably want to spend more, you probably want to come back. But hey, you know, Google is one of the biggest companies in the world and they should have enough data to analyze. If they feel like it's still okay, to overspend a budget, then they must get more money out of it, it must be a good business decision. So I like the business you're in, keeping them honest. Jon Davis I don't think you can ever go too wrong if you just follow the money in the decisions and the product. They're beholden to stakeholders and it makes sense why they're doing what they do, but I think that leaves a lot of opportunity for third party software and companies like ours to fill in those cracks and add value. AJ Wilcox So true. Give us an idea. We've been talking about the product, give us an idea on pricing. What can any of our listeners expect to spend to get access to these features? Jon Davis Sure, well, first off, you can get complete feel of Shape, all our automations through a free trial. You can manage up to 20 budget on our free trial for as long as you want to get a feel for it. If you feel like that's limiting you in any way reach out to me personally, I'll help you do a little bigger trial, if you need it. During that time, they let your team get a feel for it. After the free trial, our lowest tier is $299 a month. $299 a month and for that you can manage up to $100,000 of ad spend through your accounts. From there it progresses, you know, every $250,000 in ad spend goes up roughly about $500 a month. It works out to be anywhere from like, .1% to .2% of your ad spend is roughly the Shape fee you could ballpark expect to spend. AJ Wilcox It's really reasonable. As longtime clients, I can I can attest to that. Not that this is meant to be an ad or anything, but honestly, I want to share the partner ecosystem and I want to highlight which tools we actually think are worth paying for and which aren't. Shape definitely fits squarely in our bucket of yeah, this is definitely worth paying for. We like it. Jon Davis Thanks. That means a lot for me coming from you and to hear that.From our perspective, we work with small, medium, large agencies, all of them are fighting a battle against smaller margins over the last 5, 10 years, you know, management fees are dropping, clients expect more, for less, and that's where we've tried to keep our Shape software fee as a pretty minor percentage of your overall adspend. We did also set up a coupon code for anybody listening. If you go through the free trial and you decide that hey, shape is for me, coupon code just B2. So B2 and get you 50% off your first three months. AJ Wilcox Love it. Thanks for creating a custom code for us. That's awesome. I know you'll treat our listeners. Great. So everyone who's considering definitely take Jonn up on that offer. Jon Davis Yeah, if you submit a support ticket, it will either be me or Nicole, one of my colleagues here answering it so you can reach me jon@shape.io. Don't hesitate to reach out and answer any questions or I can give a more in depth demo for anybody interested in Shape. AJ Wilcox Beautiful. Alright, so away from business here or this could include business, too, but I'm curious, what are you most excited about either professionally or personally coming up? Like what's getting you out of bed in the morning? Jon Davis Yeah, I mean, I think professionally for us, it's really now we've made it through a lot of the hard startup years, the beginning years. We're seven years now and we have a really good belief in our product market fit. And for an entrepreneur, there's no better feeling to get you out of bed than feeling like you've got product market fit. And I think that's the one thing that is really nobody can ever predict if you're going to get it. Nobody knows if you have it before you have it. And the only way to get it is to really try and go out there and knowing that we're building a product 1,000s of people use every day, that's an easy reason to get out of bed and make sure that we're helping them with their jobs. You know, when my kids asked, What do you do? It's kind of hard to explain to a four year old what being a co-founder of PPC management software startup is, but I pretty much just say I help make tools that live in the computer that help make people's jobs easier and more fun. And I think that's really the core of what helps me get out of bed professionally. Just hanging out with my kiddos and seeing what they're going to get into next. We've been doing a bunch of skiing this year and hoping maybe this is the summer they pick up golf a little bit more. And let's see my old 1994 Land Cruiser that I just picked up a little while ago helps get me out of bed to figure out what I'm going to fix up on that next or build that up next for the trail. AJ Wilcox Sweet. You're speaking my language. I'm just headed out on our side by side the end of this week doing some off roading. I'm not handy enough to fix up my own Land Cruiser, but I'll play in the side by side. That'll be fun. Jon Davis We'll have to connect up on that! AJ Wilcox Yeah, it'd be fun. Jon, thanks so much for joining us, sharing about your product, giving us some insights, teaching us about budgeting on LinkedIn and the other platform. So sincerely, thanks for coming on. Anything else you want to share with us or anything else or anything else we should know? Jon Davis No, I think that'll do it. Thanks so much for having me. I feel like I've gotten to have like a 40 minute plug here so I don't need to plug anything else. Most important thing is if you want to talk to me or reach me about anything PPC related, jon@shape.io and I'll be happy to talk to anybody that has any questions. It's really fun to get to talk to new PPC analysts see how new teams are doing stuff and if Shape can help them. AJ Wilcox Perfect. Thanks so much, Jon. Sure appreciate having you on! Jon Davis Thanks a bunch, AJ. 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. AJ Wilcox Alright, I've got the episode resources for you here. So first off, Jon was so generous in giving us his email address. So if you want to email him directly to ask any question about anything we've covered here, it's jon@shape.io. You'll also see that down below in the show notes. Next, if you do decide to sign up for Shape, use the coupon code on shape.io of just the letter B and the number 2, that's also going to be in the show notes as well. As a reminder, if you have any colleagues or even you yourself are new to LinkedIn Ads, and you're trying to learn it, definitely check out the course that I did with LinkedIn Learning. The link is in the show notes below and it is by far the most comprehensive, as well as one of the cheapest courses you can find out there and LinkedIn stands behind it. On whatever podcast player you're listening to this on, if you like what you've heard, please hit that subscribe button so you can hear all of our future episodes as we come out with them. You may want to go back and binge a few along the way as well. I'm not judging. If you do like what you've heard, please do review the podcast. Most of those reviews happen on Apple podcasts. But I've heard that reviews are starting to happen on Spotify as well. But really anywhere that you listen, anywhere you find reviews, I would absolutely love to see your review and I'll totally shout you out as well. With any suggestions or corrections. You can reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Example image of LinkedIn's new navigation in Campaign Manager NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.   Show Transcript Did you know that LinkedIn has an analytics tool that you can get professional insights about your website visitors, and you don't have to spend a dime on LinkedIn Ads? It's all about that and more on this week's LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there, LinkedIn Ads fanatics. You know, LinkedIn gives us a really rich understanding of who is interacting with our ads, and actually, who's interacting with us on our websites as well. And they call this demographics and website demographics, both of them being a separate area of LinkedIn. So we're going to walk through all of that. I'm going to give you the pros and cons, what you should pay attention to, what you should be using. First up here in the news, if you're in campaign manager this week, you'll notice a banner along the top of your screen that says coming soon, campaign manager is launching a new navigation experience. So this is cool. This means that LinkedIn is not necessarily changing their toolset, but we are going to see it look a little bit different, we'll have a different and hopefully better user experience. When I clicked through the help article, LinkedIn's help section actually shows a screenshot of what it's going to look like. And it looks pretty good. I'll include in the show notes, a link, so you can actually see what it looks like as well. That means down the left side, now, you'll see plan, advertise, test, analyze, assets, account settings, and company page. Now plan comes first, which tells me it should be the default experience. Under plan, it's going to include your matched audiences and your block lists, if you're using block lists, the LinkedIn Audience Network. Then, next comes advertise. This comes second in the list, but I definitely think this should be first because it's really just normal campaign manager. Then you'll have test, which we've had along the top navigation for a while, it gets you into brand lift studies that you can run, you or your client is spending more than like $90,000 a quarter. Then we have analyze and it says "Gain insights about your website audience with professional data and set up and measure conversions for your ads." I'm just reading into this, but it looks like it's going to be add demographics, which we're talking about today and maybe it's going to be conversion tracking setup, maybe it'll even include the insight tag, I'm not sure at this point. Previously, those things were found underneath assets. The next one is assets. And this one, it says it's going to have lead gen forms and landing pages. When you look into it, landing pages is only if you're using LinkedIn recruiter. If you have a recruiter license, it allows you to create some landing pages for recruiting. Most of our listeners won't have to worry about that at all. Then there's account settings which we expect to have the normal account settings, like who manages what, who has access to the account, all of that kind of stuff, the company page, it's attached to, currency, and the name of the account, I expect all that to be here. And then the last one is company page, it looks like it might just be a link to your company page or maybe it's a link to the settings around your company page. Either one, pretty cool. So I think it's going to take some time getting used to it. I do wish advertise came first in the list because from a user experience perspective, when we log into campaign manager, advertise is the majority of what we're going to be doing so I expect that I just don't know why they put plan first in the list. It does look to me like these sections will mostly have dropdowns with expansion, so that you don't have to actually leave the page to explore what each one of these categories does. So I'm a fan of that. If any of these take us to a different page, I do politely request LinkedIn to have all of them open in new pages so we don't lose wherever we were in campaign manager, that would be cool for all of us who want to get in and explore all the new options here. Alright, with all of that, we're gonna dive into the meat of this. Let's hit it. So first, let's talk about the paid demographic side on LinkedIn. What this is, is as you're running ads, you can get some demographic data about the kind of people who are receiving impressions and taking action on your ads. Anywhere in your account where you can see your campaign performance, in the upper right hand corner, you'll see a box or a button. This is demographics. As soon as you click that, whatever you've selected down within your campaigns, whether it's campaigns, or ads, or campaign groups, you'll then be able to start seeing the demographics that are within them. It's helpful to note that this obeys your time range. So you can look at your demographics by time. So if you make a big change in your account or a big change in a campaign, you can segment out and look at how your demographics have changed over time. That's something really helpful to see, like the changes I'm making to my targeting over time, are they helping or are they hurting? So as you click that button, it takes you to where it'll show you demographics and then it'll tell you if you've selected a certain number of campaigns or ads or whatever. The default place that will take you is showing you a breakdown by job function. And job function is just the department that someone works in. So as I'm looking through my own here, I can see that it's showing me impressions and clicks and click through rate. And those are just the basics for any campaign that LinkedIn doesn't have deeper dimensions and data on, which we'll get into here in a minute. Then it's sorted by the job function that has the most impressions starting out. So inside of this account that I'm looking at sales is the highest, followed by marketing, followed by business development, followed by operations. But of course, job function isn't the only targeting type to break your your traffic down by so when you click next to where it says display: job function, there's a drop down, and it gives you all kinds of other things that you can display your ad demographics by. There's job function, there's job title, there's company name, there's company industry, there's jobs seniority, company size, location, and then two new ones that we got after the Microsoft acquisition, country/region, and county. Now, because the campaign's I'm looking at here happen to be text ads, the only breakdowns I get are impressions, clicks, and click through rate. If you are analyzing a lead gen form campaign, for instance, it'll give you impressions, lead form opens, open rate, leads, and lead completion rate. Similarly, if you're looking at video campaigns, you'll see impressions, views, view rate, completions, and video completion rate. If you're looking at sponsored messaging campaigns only, you'll see sends, opens, open rate, clicks, and click to open rate. So these are all worth exploring. It's really cool. Now there are certainly some limitations to this. The first is that your chart can only include 300 entities at a time. So if you're looking at campaigns, and let's say you have 320 campaigns in your account, you can only have 300 accounted for here within your demographics. And so you would have to segment something out to be able to see all of your data. Another limitation is, if you wanted to see video stats, like I mentioned, you could see like percentage completions and all that, you do have to make sure that you have selected only video campaigns, otherwise, it won't show you the video stats. Same thing with all the other ad formats, make sure that you go and specifically select just those campaigns within that ad format you're looking at. Alright, so you can see a little bit of demographic data about the people that you're paying to send ads to and that makes a lot of sense, but you might be asking, AJ, what do I do with this? Like, how do I actually use this strategically? Well, here are just a few ways that we use them strategically, to help us manage accounts better. And I'll admit, there's not a whole lot of really actionable information here, unless you see some segment of the population who's coming in as traffic or leads that you don't want, then that's pretty actionable. So let's say for instance, that you're running a job function campaign. And then if you come in and look at job title breakdown inside of your demographics, it's going to show your your about top 20 job titles that have been sending traffic. It's really helpful to look at this to say, are the job titles being represented here? Are they representative of the audience I want to reach? If you see a whole lot here that aren't a good fit for your target audience, there are a couple actions you could take. The first is you could possibly go in and try to exclude those job titles. Or the second is you could say, ah, looks like job function might be too broad here, because it's letting in a lot of people who aren't a good fit. So really, this is a comparison, a measure of how qualified your traffic is. If you're using lead gen form campaigns, for instance, you can actually see how qualified your leads are because it'll actually show you a breakdown of the job titles, or the seniorities, or the company sizes, etc, who are contributing and becoming leads. Many of you may know that as you're building a campaign over in the right rail, you can see a bit of an audience breakdown and here's how this is different. So the one that you can access within building the campaign, where on the right rail you click on where it says show segments, and what it's doing is you've defined a target audience over on the left side from choosing your targeting. And on the right side, LinkedIn is breaking this down by how the targeting you are using breaks down their membership into these different segments like job function, seniority, years of experience, company size, etc. So let's say that you have a really inactive portion of your audience. When you look here at the show segments within the campaign, it's going to show you representative, hey, there's a whole bunch of people who fit this criteria, but then when you actually go to advertise, and you find out, they're not on LinkedIn very often. The actual ad demographics that we've been talking about, they're going to be a lot more accurate. On the flip side to that, you might find that certain segments of your audience are overactive. So here's an example of that. Let's say you're building a campaign, and often the right rail under your segment breakdown, you see that 35% of your audience is made up of chief marketing officers. But you look at the demographics tab, instead of campaign manager. And you see that Chief Marketing Officers are contributing to 50% of your ad engagement. What that's telling you is of all of that audience that LinkedIn thought that you were going to be targeting, you have one really hyperactive segment who they're either more active on the platform, or they're engaging with your ads at a higher rate. And I would argue that's a really good thing, that's going to teach you a lot about who this target audience is. Here's a quick sponsor break and then we'll dive into the free website demographics that everyone should be using, whether you're advertising on LinkedIn or not Ads experts. If the performance of your LinkedIn ads is important to you, B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $150 million on LinkedIn Ads, and no one outperforms us on getting you the lowest cost per lead and the most scale. We're official LinkedIn partners and you'll deal only with LinkedIn ads experts from day one. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to chat about your campaigns and we'd absolutely love to get to work with you. Alright, let's jump into the free demographics data we get from LinkedIn Ads, I'm imagining that every single person listening right now has heard of Google Analytics, I'm also imagining that a good portion of you have heard of and maybe even used Facebook analytics. Both of these are tools that are free, provided by a platform, giving you some sort of an insight into your engagement, or your website traffic. One very overlooked tool that you have in your arsenal is actually what I would have called LinkedIn analytics. But LinkedIn themselves, they just call it website demographics. It's hidden within their ad tool and I don't hear anyone talking about this, but again, I think everyone here should be checking it out, especially because it's kind of like a ticking time bomb. At some point, this isn't going to be useful to us anymore. I'm guessing. That's my prediction. Okay, so first off, how do you get to this? Well, right along the top navigation, and I know, at some point here in the near future, LinkedIn is launching their new navigation experience. So these will probably be along the left side. But at least for right now, if you're just listening to this, right as soon as the episode comes out, it's along the top. You'll click the button that says website demographics. What this is, is very similar to your ad demographics, but it's showing who is actually visiting your website that LinkedIn recognizes. And of course, for LinkedIn to actually recognize what's going on on your website, you have to have the LinkedIn insight tag installed. In the world we live in right now, where some cookies are still persistent in people's browsers, what's happening is someone comes in visit to your company website, it fires the LinkedIn insight tag, LinkedIn is then looking at the cookies in that person's browser to see if they're currently logged in to LinkedIn. If they are logged in, it understands who that person is and then kind of adds them to this list of the people who are interacting on your website. Then they can aggregate that data here within the website demographics tab, and show you a cool breakdown of the kinds of people who are using your website. Now, the reason that I think that this is hidden right within campaign manager is you really do have to have the insight tag installed. But, I really do wish that this was a separate domain, where it was like LinkedInanalytics.com, and you go and install the Insight tag, you know, it's the same one you'd use for advertising, but you install it, if you have an ad account, it syncs to it so you're always using the same insight tag, it's not going to give you a second one, which would be a real problem if you tried to implement both. Then I think people would use it more. We probably see people talking about it at PPC conferences and stuff. At least so far, I haven't seen people get too excited about the feature, but I really like it. One of the biggest things that I like about this, it's being able to analyze your website traffic by who someone is professionally. This isn't just those who are interacting with your ads, because we expect to get some data on who they are because we're paying for it. This is anyone who uses your website that LinkedIn recommends. Think about it, if you are specifically selling a product to companies of 200 or more employees, but you look here in your website demographics and realize it's made up of a whole bunch of interactions from employees who are at companies with a size of like 11 to 50, then you know that maybe some of the other marketing you're doing isn't hitting the right audience and you could maybe try to adjust that somehow. And, of course, you don't have to pay a dime for this, you don't have to be a current advertiser, you just get to go open a LinkedIn Ads account, which is free, install the Insight tag and then as soon as your website has generated at least 300 people that LinkedIn can identify, all of a sudden, boom, you're getting this data. That's pretty cool. Obviously, the reason why LinkedIn would give us this data for free, is to help us want to buy more ads, I'm imagining that it would work like this, if you're seeing that a lot of the people on your website are not from the titles, or the right size companies, or representing the right industries, you might want to pay for additional people of the right people to get them there. So I'm sure that's what the aim of this is, but again, I think this is super valuable, even for B2C companies to make sure you're getting. As far as I understand this is 100%, based on the cookies in someone's browser. After iOS 14.5, we know that iOS devices, or any Apple device isn't going to reliably carry that browser cookie anymore so we have no idea how many of those people are making it through this. This just got a lot less valuable. Here in the next year, when Google Chrome stops accepting third party cookies, we're going to see another big chunk taken out of here. I wouldn't be surprised if here in the next year or two years, this product is obsolete, but we can sure use it now. I do hope that LinkedIn does something to improve it to save the data. Now, of course, everyone uses Google Analytics. Google Analytics is really cool to see how people are interacting with your website. So what pages they're viewing, and what they're doing on those pages, where they came from, the technical aspects about them. So what screen size are they using? What language is their browser set to? What part of the world are they from based on their IP address? Google is really cool to see how people are interacting with your website. Then you have Facebook Analytics, which is very much a social breakdown of who is interacting on your website. So you might get information, like, for instance, you can see how someone is engaging with your website, compared to how they engage with it socially. So it'll tell you the number of views that that page got, according to what Facebook can see, but then how many times people have liked that page, how many Facebook members that post reached, and that kind of information. Obviously really helpful if you're doing a lot with Facebook Ads. LinkedIn doesn't really get into the structure of your LinkedIn website demographics, or what I would prefer, they call LinkedIn analytics. It just tells you the amount of interaction you get from each type of professional breakdown from someone on LinkedIn. So like, we've talked about, their job function, their job title, the company they represent, their industry, seniority, company size, location, country/region, and county. It works the same way as your free demographics, you just look for where it says display:, and then you click that break down and choose how you want to see your traffic. Like we mentioned, it requires having the Insight tag installed on your website. Sometimes we haven't quite figured out when this is the case, but sometimes it won't actually start collecting this data until you set up a matched audience. Specifically a website retargeting audience. So the best thing you can do, when you set up a new LinkedIn ads account, immediately go into your matched audiences, it's creating a retargeting segment of everyone who visits the website. And then you're sure to at least get this data on everyone that LinkedIn recognizes from that group. Some of the breakdowns that you can get here are like, you can see the percentage of the pageviews that LinkedIn figured out that were generated from each of those targeting facets. You can see the number of pageviews in the upper left hand corner that this represents. So for instance, on the data I'm looking at, I can see that companies with size 11 to 50, make up 34.2% of my pageviews and then I look in the upper left hand corner, and I can see this is representing 3,156 pageviews and so I could figure out oh, that's a little over 1000 people who represent companies of the size 11 to 50. We can also see a time period change. So it will automatically compare to the previous segment. So if you're just looking at the last seven days, it will show you how that has changed up or down by what percentage compared to the previous seven days to that. And one other really cool thing here that I don't hear people talk about a lot, but you can actually break this data down by any sort of segment on your website that you have previously created. So let me give you an example. Let's say that you took my advice, you went in and created one website retargeting segment that is everyone who came to the website. And then maybe you also say, hey, let's create a segment that just retarget anyone who has made it to one of our landing pages. And then let's say that you do another one that's just anyone who hit one of our thank you pages. This is where they hit only after they've already become a lead. You now have these three different segments. And here inside of LinkedIn's website demographics tab, the very first option, you'll see where it says website audience, there will be a little drop down arrow. You can click that and you can look by each of these retargeting segments. So you can see what's the difference in someone, you know, professionally, who visits the website, versus those who make it to our landing page, versus those who actually end up converting. If you can see the demographics of the people who tend to convert, isn't that gonna make you update your campaigns and go and target more people like that? I think it's a really, really natural way of closing that loop. I mentioned before, this is totally based on cookies, which means it might go away, it might not be useful after cookies aren't helpful, but my hope is that LinkedIn finds a way to update this and get us this kind of data because I don't think this is going to be overly valuable if it only represents like less than 20% of all the traffic across the website. But, certainly I'm grateful for whatever data we can get. 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. All right, I've got the episode resources for you. First off in the example image of what LinkedIn's new navigation is going to look like inside of campaign manager, so definitely check down in the show notes for the link that you can see what that's going to look like or you can go search on LinkedIn's Help section for it. If you or anyone you know, is looking to learn LinkedIn Ads at a deeper level, check out the course that I did with LinkedIn Learning. The link is also going to be in the show notes. It's the least expensive and the best course out there so far. If you like what you heard, please do look down at your podcast player and hit subscribe, if you're not already. I do want you hearing all the new episodes that come out if LinkedIn Ads is in your wheelhouse. And please do rate it. Rate the podcast. Of course we'd love to see the five stars, but if you have anything critical you want to say or you want us to change, I'd love to hear it so feel free to say it in the comments or just email it to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. Please leave a review for the podcast. It helps other people, like you, other ads managers, other LinkedIn ads fanatics, find the show. Of course, we're always grateful if you do that. We'll even shout you out here on the show. Alright, with that being said, we'll see you back here for the next episode. We're cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Episode 51: Boosted Posts Episode 7: Account Organization Episode 36: AB Testing Strategy Episode 17: Leadgen Forms Episode 20: Audience Sizes NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.   Show Transcript What are the top challenges that LinkedIn advertisers face? How do you get around them? Well, we're tackling them directly from the community this week on the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. So we asked you, the LinkedIn Ads community, for the top challenges you face on the platform. And today I'm going to share our recommendations, explanations, how to overcome them, work arounds, anything like that that would be helpful to your largest challenges. I think it goes without saying, but a huge thank you to those of you who responded by providing your challenges. We always love to hear from our listeners and we certainly love to explore all the different areas of LinkedIn Ads. Alright, let's hit it. Okay, longtime listener of the show Maninder Paul says, "I want a schedule feature! It would save so much hassle. Is there another way to automate ad scheduling, say only on weekdays, just trying my luck, smiley face." She followed that up by saying, "Curious, do you let the ads run over the weekend, or keep them strictly for weekdays." So lots of questions specifically about scheduling. And we'll definitely have an episode about this in the future. But this is super, super important to be able to schedule on LinkedIn. We know that the majority of the traffic patterns are going to follow the patterns of the general work day, which is not something that we see on the other ad platforms. And the fact that LinkedIn has never released a scheduling feature is actually just kind of embarrassing. For lots of years, I did things like waking up early to make sure I unpaused campaigns at certain times and pausssed at the end of the day and pause before I left for a weekend. I'm pausing when I came back. So even if you can't really schedule your campaigns, at least automatically within campaign manager, there are lots of different things that you can still do to test everything that you're asking about. So it is manual, but you can test different days of the week. That's actually pretty easy because even if you're just letting your ads run, you can still analyze your data by day of the week. And LinkedIn lets us do that pretty easily. When you start pulling in data from your analytics platform, and CRMs, that's when you can start to figure out what times of day certain leads, or certain lead quality is occurring. So I would highly recommend, you know, at least to start out, go ahead and run your ads across all days of the week, but go back and analyze and if you find that your weekends are bringing in a higher cost per lead, or a lower quality of lead, that could be a clue to you that you might want to pause on the weekends. But as fair warning, we've had several clients who actually perform better on weekends and less on weekdays so we end up bidding them up over the weekends, or even trying to fully exhaust their monthly budget based just on weekends. So totally depends on the strategy, the audience, the offer the client, all of that. Like we've mentioned before, ad scheduling is definitely a challenge. That's why we came up with our own internal scheduling tool. So if you partner with us, you get free access to the tool, along with access to our full team of experts. So little bit of a plug there. But yeah, we've felt exactly the same painn, and we turned to technology to solve it because LinkedIn obviously wasn't gonna do it. Another longtime listener of the show and friend, Leonardo Bellini says, "Hi, AJ, I have some questions or issues." And he lists three points here. Number one, "As you know, it's now impossible to use message ads here in Italy. What's the best LinkedIn ads alternatives?" Number two, he asks, "When is it meaningful to use message or conversation ads?" And then number three, "Speaking about follower ads, I have noticed are not performing and are a bit expensive, which is the best campaign or approach to increase a LinkedIn page follower count?" So this is something that we haven't talked about on the show before. But in Europe, because of GDPR, LinkedIn basically took all of the sponsored messaging ad formats, message ads, and conversation ads just off the table. And I certainly hope their lawyers are hard at work trying to figure out how they can make these work, because they are certainly helpful ad formats. That being said, I've talked about in the past how they are LinkedIn's most expensive ads on average, and they probably only work well in about 5% of the cases that we see. They work best when you have a personal invitation. So Sponsored messaging looks like it comes from a person. And if it's just saying, Hey, I thought you'd like to download this white paper, or I thought you'd like to talk to our sales rep, those things don't feel personal and because you pay for the sand and not for the click, if you have an offer that doesn't get clicked on the overall cost per click and therefore cost per lead becomes insanely expensive. Here in North America, we see an average of like $28 to $58 per click on these message formats. So most of the time, I would say, not a big loss. But if you do have a really good personal invitation type of offer that would work well, and you happen to live in Europe where we can't use them, my recommendation would be, if you can't use the sponsored messaging ad formats, use sponsored content ads, instead. Most of the time these perform better anyway, they will feel less personal. But most of the time, they'll have a lower cost per click, and therefore a lower cost per conversion. And because they're right there in the newsfeed, which as we know, is the default experience for both desktop and mobile users of LinkedIn, you'll definitely reach quite a few people. It won't be quite guaranteed delivery, like the sponsored message ad formats are, but as good as it comes. Then, for your question or point on follower campaigns, there are two ways through advertising that we can increase followers. The first is, like you mentioned, follower ads. Now follower ads are a variant of a dynamic ad. And we see dynamic ads usually costing anywhere between about $6 to $8 per click. Well, one of these variants, the main call to action is to follow the company. So they're not high in volume, it's really hard to get a lot of followers from these ads, just because they're over in the right rail, which is only on desktop so immediately, you're cutting out like 80% of your your possible users here who could see the ads, and we find that they have about a 50% take rate. So on average, you're gonna end up with like a $13 to $16 cost per follow, which, if you ask me across any other platform, I would say that's insanely expensive, but if that's your goal is to get more followers, that's by far the the most cost effective way to do it on LinkedIn. The next way that you could do it is by using sponsored content ads. And specifically by choosing the engagement objective. When you use the engagement objective, it puts in the upper right hand corner of the ad, a company follow button. So what we've tried in the past is put an ad together where the main call to action is to hit that button, like, make sure to follow us for more like this. The cost per follow on these are much higher, because the call to action isn't nearly as easy, not nearly as direct, but it can be because it's in the newsfeed, meaning it's going to be seen by people on mobile as well. It could be a good combination effort in conjunction with your dynamic follower ads to work together. We're running this for several clients currently who their main objective is to get new followers. And yeah, definitely the cost per follower are higher from sponsored content. But when we use them in concert with each other, we can get a higher volume of followers in the timeframe. Another longtime follower and fan of the show, Lindsay Beaulieu. Lindsey, I hope I'm pronouncing your last name right, feel free to correct me. She listed four challenges to her on the platform. Number one, "The ability to easily change campaign objectives without having to duplicate the entire campaign. Other platforms enable us to change objective depending on what we're optimizing for." Alright, Lindsay, I'm going to tackle this one straight up, and then we'll move on to your other ones as well. You're right. If you go to a campaign and you tell it to duplicate, there's no way to change the objective. So if you are duplicating a video ad campaign with a video views objective, oh, sure, you can change the name of the campaign and the targeting. But it's going to be a video views objective and a video views campaign when you're done, which really isn't all that helpful, especially like you're intimating here, that you're testing and changing different objectives based off of your actual business objective. Imagine that, it's smart practice. So the way that I do it is I go into the campaign that I want to duplicate. And when you scroll down right below the targeting, on the right side, you'll see view audience summary and save audience. So if you hit save audience there, it lets you basically make a copy that sticks to your personal LinkedIn profile. It's not in the account, you as the ads manager now have this saved, and you can reuse it on any account that you have access to. So you save a copy of this audience and then you just go through the normal campaign creation process. And basically right as soon as you start creating the campaign, right next to audience, you'll see a drop down that says saved audiences. When you click that, now you'll see the one that you just created are saved. So what you're doing is rather than duplicating the campaign, you're creating a new one and you're just bringing the targeting over. Of course, that means you still have to name the campaign, you still have to set your objective, you still have to set your bid and budget, but at least your audience, if this is a group campaign, and you've gone out to go find 100 groups to fill up your targeting there, this is helpful, it's at least a time saver. So she lists two challenges here, "A low number of lead form submissions", and "High costs per conversion". So these are definitely challenges on the platform and from what we found, there are several contributing factors here. So the low number of lead form submissions, we find that most of the time, it's because the offer is not attractive enough to make people actually want to fill out the form. And so our job then as advertisers is to find out what is it that our audience actually really wants? What would they be willing to sacrifice, their email address, and first name and last name for. If your offer is truly great, people will jump over any hurdle to get access to it. So I know that puts a lot of pressure on us as marketers to research and find something that our audience likes. But really, everything hinges on your offer being actually attractive. Some other contributing factors that add friction to this, though, are things like asking for too much information or excessive fields. Just because you're using LinkedIn lead generation forms, and everything gets auto populated into the form, it doesn't mean that you can ask for 9, 10, 11 pieces of information and expect that it's going to have a great conversion rate. Anytime that we are asking for more information, even if it's auto filled, people get a little bit suspicious and protective of their data. Also, if you add what we call high friction fields, so fields like forcing them to put their work email address in rather than just taking their login email address, or adding their phone number, these fields are high friction, because the user actually has to type and its information they usually try to guard really closely. They've got to really want that offer that you're presenting in order to fill out those fields. So if you're using too many fields, or any of these high friction fields, that will cut down on on your conversion rates here. Something else we've noticed, if you're using LinkedIn lead gen forms, the form itself, at the very top, you'll get an opportunity to give them a little bit more information than the ad itself was giving them. I like to think of this as like a cheerleader step, when they get here, you can be like you're one click away from getting access to these awesome, amazing insights that our researchers come up with basically telling them you're on the right track, you've made the right decision to open this form. Keep filling it out. Now, of course, if you're not using LinkedIn lead gen forms, and instead you're sending people to a landing page, the biggest element we've seen here that leads to low form fill rates, aside from the offer just not being inherently interesting, is page load speed. So if you're sending traffic to a landing page, and you have a redirected link, so LinkedIn automatically will create an lnkd.in shortened link. Or if you're using your own bitly links, that probably takes a full two seconds right there to just work through that redirect, especially on 3g connections when someone's not by Wi Fi. If your pages taking 3, 4, 5, 6 seconds to load, when you're talking about eight seconds all ina and people when they click on an ad are like, yeah, I didn't really want it that bad and they bounce. So LinkedIn will report the click, they'll say you're paying for this, these 16 people clicked. But you look at your analytics and you're like, analytics only says four people made it here. Well, that's not because LinkedIn is cheating you, it's because they came to the page, but left before analytics was able to track the visit before that tag was able to fire. And of course, low conversion rates lead to high cost per conversion. So Lindsay, that takes care of your third point there. And your last one here, "Creating a look alike audience off of detailed targeting". So for anyone who doesn't know, you can create a look alike audience inside of LinkedIn's matched audiences based on pretty much any audience that you have collected there. So you can do a look alike based off of your website retargeting or lists that you've uploaded. And what LinkedIn is doing in this case is looking at the original list and trying to find people it feels like are similar but not on the list. So we can't create a look alike based off of LinkedIn's native targeting specifically using matched audiences, but you can by the feature that they've added in there that's auto checked all the time called LinkedIn audience expansion. Now in general, we do advise against using audience expansion in about 100% of cases. For several reasons, performance has never been great. From our experience, it tends to muddy our audiences. And we can't actually analyze this audience separately from the native audience that we've selected. So basically, our campaigns targeting gets dirty, and we have no way to tell like what parts dirty and what parts clean. So that's why we don't like audience expansion. But if you're trying to find a lookalike version of native targeting that you've done inside of a LinkedIn campaign, then audience expansion is your best way to do that. I would absolutely love to hear from any of you who have had a really good experience with LinkedIn's look alike audiences. Because in every case that we've ever tested, our explicit targeting beats the look alikes every time. When we do use it, though, we always make sure to layer additional native criteria on top of the look alike audience to put some guardrails on it, like we'll usually put a geography and securities or usually not something like job titles, it's too restrictive, but things like that to just put some guardrails on it to make sure we're getting the right people in. But again, anyone who's had really good experience with lookalikes, please do write us in the show and let us know. I'd love to see an example of this. Abby Kelsey mentions a really, really good one here. She says, "Strategies for ABM campaigns, organizing audience sizes, key offerings, stages of the funnel, etc. It can be hard to do tailored content and offerings for different ABM campaigns and balanced audience size and personas". Abby, you're so right, this is a huge, huge pain. And it definitely requires a lot more of a deep dive. So as a little bit of a hint, we have an upcoming episode on ABM I would imagine here in the next month or so. There's too much in this question to simply answer here. But stay tuned for that episode, because we'll dive really deep. But thanks for that awesome question. Efrat Dekel mentions, "Hi, AJ, my questions are about boosted posts. What's the best practice to mix them with the overall LinkedIn ad strategy? And how do you demonstrate their ROI to clients?" Thanks, Efrat, I have one really, really good answer for you. Actually, if you go back and listen to episode 51, it's pretty much all about boosted posts. So go and check that one out. All of your questions will be answered there as well as anyone else who has that same question. Longtime follower of the show, Felicia Gheorghe, says, "I've been testing out different ad formats for the same audience and I find it particularly annoying that you need to make a new campaign for let's say, a lead gen form with an image format, and a new one for lead gen form with a video format, same audience and same offer. Plus all the waiting in between to gather data for each format. Of course, I wouldn't run them at the same time to compete against myself in the auction. Would be cool to hear your thoughts on this. Thank you." Alright, Felicia, I have really good news for you. At least I think it's good news. What you're experiencing here is something that that we as advertisers have faced for a long time, and LinkedIn have heard our concerns there. So last I heard they were working on being able to have multiple ad formats within the same campaign. And so if it works, the way that I think it's going to, we will have a campaign that represents the audience. And then underneath that campaign, we'll be able to insert different ad formats. So you can have a video ad and a single image ad, and maybe even a sponsored message ad going to all the same audience. I think that would be super, super cool. I love the concept, I would definitely use it, it would definitely cut down on the number of campaigns that we have in accounts. You did mention, of course, we wouldn't run them at the same time to compete against myself in the auction, I do want to clarify something here. As long as you're within the same ad account, you're not going to compete against yourself in the auction. So when a new piece of ad inventory opens up, LinkedIn is going to look at your account and find maybe you have several campaigns that are all ready to show an ad in that one slot. So certainly LinkedIn auction is going to have to decide which of your campaigns and which of those ads get to show there. But it's more like cannibalization, where they're taking an impression from one area of the account that could have gone to the other, but less of actually competing against yourself. When I think of competing, I'm thinking like bidding yourself up in the auction and making you pay more. That will happen if you're running two separate accounts for the same client gets the same audience, but as long as it's all within the same account, don't worry, you're not actually bidding yourself up. I know it's annoying, but at least for the time being, what we do is just go ahead and create a separate campaign for every objective, every audience, and every ad format. And what we do is we put a naming structure in place to make it really easy to sort out which objective is being used, which audience is being targeted, and which ad format it is. And because of that naming structure for our campaigns, it makes reporting a lot easier. So if I were you, until we have that feature of being able to put multiple ad formats in the same campaign, I would take a really good look at your naming structure of your campaigns, and see if you can put something together that makes it a lot easier to measure, analyze, and watch. Alright, here's a quick sponsor break. And then we'll dive into more of the challenges and possible solutions here from the community. 20:47 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked, the LinkedIn Ads experts. 20:56 If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you, B2Linked is the ad agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $150 million on LinkedIn Ads, and no one outperforms us at getting you the lowest cost per lead, and the most scale of your ads. Were official LinkedIn partners and you'll deal only with LinkedIn ads, experts from day one. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to chat about your campaigns. We'd absolutely love to work with you. All right, now let's jump back into the additional challenges. Again, we have a loyal listener of the show, Alex Panchuk. He says, "Not being able to target or make adjustments by device. In 2022, it's so 2000ish". Alex, I totally agree. And not having any scheduling options like running campaigns Monday to Friday and not Saturday to Sunday. Even far newer Quora, Reddit, Tik Tok, etc. all have them. Alex, I totally agree with you, I think it's pretty ridiculous that we don't have scheduling. I know I mentioned it in a previous answer here, but I do hope at some point that LinkedIn realizes the value and importance of doing that. I know they've gotten the feedback. I know I've given it to him. So hopefully they'll take it to heart. Again, that's why we created an internal tool to do it. We needed the functionality, so we just had to build it. Brett Creed asks, "Is there a way like on Facebook where you can do social interaction retargeting for anyone who has clicked on your ads, page, or engaged with you in any way minus the people who have completed the lead gen form? Seems so simple on Facebook, wondering if you have any secrets you could share?" Really good question. So LinkedIn does have the same type of thing where they have these engagements that they can retarget, but the engagements are so much more limited than what Facebook allows. We can't retarget people who've liked or commented or anything like that. The best that we do have though, we can retarget those who have opened a lead gen form. So at least if they've shown enough interest to click on the ad, you can retarget them that way. The most effective way though to get people into your retargeting audience is to target 25% video viewers. So what you can do is basically upload a video ad that's less than 10 seconds long, call it something like eight seconds, and then retarget anyone who has watched at least 25% of that, that way, anyone who passes the two second view mark, which is like a quarter of everyone in the audience, usually you can at least get them into your retargeting audience. But I really, really hope we get this in the future. LinkedIn has rolled out so many more of these engagements that you can retarget, like a company page visitor, for instance, there's so much more they can do here. And this is especially valuable because website retargeting across all the platforms is just it's drying up, it's dying, with the death of the cookie. Tom McAllister asks, "Do you have any thoughts on campaign organization? Recently came into a new business that just started running LinkedIn Ads with an agency. That agency created top of funnel and middle of funnel campaign groups with about 19 campaigns in each of them." Tom, really good question. Check out episode seven of the podcast about account organization, I go into a lot more detail there. We don't like campaign groups, they tend to not do much at all, they just take up space and make you have to click through more levels. So we'd probably end up doing something similar to that other agency where we're creating, like, significant numbers of campaigns at different stages of the funnel. We just do it all in one campaign group, usually, unless we absolutely had a reason to split it up by campaign group. Hopefully that agency is doing a good job. It sounds like if they're willing to go in and create 20ish campaigns per campaign group, hopefully that means that they are pretty good at what they do. But, certainly come hit us up if you ever want a quote. Mark Nelson says, "Hey AJ, I love the show. I'm struggling setting up an ABM campaign with limited audience sizes on LinkedIn, Google Display, and Facebook. Say that you have 200 target accounts for your ABM campaign and you upload your contact audience, say 1000 contacts, averaging five per account, and assume LinkedIn matches 90% plus. If 25% of the audience interact with my ads, and I create a new audience for this, so as to target to the next stage, I'm stuffed as my audience isn't large enough. Could you come up with some specific pointers to address the issue?" Mark, this is really, really good. I love the way that you've laid this out, I will have the ABM episode coming up in the next probably month or two. But in short, LinkedIn is absolutely amazing for account based targeting. But it is terrible at being able to customize the messaging by account, you always have to have at least 300 people in an audience for it to be able to serve, period, which is a huge limitation. My suggested strategy here is add as many accounts as you can, you obviously want these audiences to be as large as possible. And don't use job title to match on these accounts. Try to use something that's a little bit more broad because LinkedIn only understands about 30% of job titles out there. So if you can use something more like job function with seniority to narrow in on those five contacts per account, you'll match a larger amount. But then even getting 25% of your target audience to interact with the ad, it would be hard to count on that and especially all of that happening within the timeframe that you're allowed to create a retargeting audience, which is 180 days. So my recommendation would be to flight your messaging to that audience, to that ABM audience. So rather than relying on having two separate campaigns, one being the original audience, and then one retarget, anyone who interacted, I might suggest, and you could actually do both of these strategies concurrently. I would suggest run the brand awareness messaging to that first audience and then once those ads have run their course, then show more of like a middle of funnel or bottom of the funnel type of ad and work them down. What you'd be doing is hitting the same audience and saturating them over time, in hopes that they would naturally be ready for the next step in the funnel. And then hopefully, by the time you've done this a few times, the engagements that you did get on those ads, hopefully, things like a 25% video view or a lead form open, you could get an audience that's larger than 300, to be able to retarget them at the next step. Next challenge. Laura Conti says, "Hi, AJ, thanks for your precious podcast. It would be amazing to go into depth with optimization. I listened to your podcast and it was interesting. How to optimize step by step? What is statistical significance? How long to run a campaign to decide to stop and optimize? Thanks." All right, Laura, great questions, great requests. But I definitely can't fully address all of those aspects here, Episode 36, which you've probably already listened to. That's a really good resource on how I think about optimization and testing. But this is really good feedback. I'll plan a future episode to go through more of this. Addison Witt says, "The quality of lead generation forms. Any recommendations on manual fields to add to the form?" Addison, check out Episode 17, where we go into a lot of depth on the lead gen forms and we do touch on quality. This isn't what you're asking, but basically, anytime we use lead gen forms, we do get feedback from sales teams talking about how the lead quality dropped. And that's kind of unfair to say it's not because the people in the audience are any less quality. But it's usually because we've made it so easy for someone to convert that more of the people who didn't decide to convert, end up converting, and they may not be as committed or have the need you solve. The classic answer here is to add a work email field because most sales teams and most lead scoring algorithms will look at an email address that's like a Gmail or Yahoo email address and they'll call that low quality. But it's still problematic if you add the work email field, because it's not going to autofill in the vast majority of cases. And so now you're telling users who are on their mobile devices, that they have to stop and type in their work email, with their thumbs on their mobile device, which is a lot of effort, and we will see the conversion rates drop from doing this. But then there is no way to validate that it actually is their work email, they might still type in their Gmail. And so because of this, there have been a lot of companies who are big spenders on LinkedIn, that can't use the lead gen forms, they have to send to a landing page where they can actually validate and qualify the email that's being written is not one of the free services out there. If you're ever in that circumstance of where you have too many leads for your sales team to work with, you can always add a little bit of extra friction to just further qualify them so that sales is only dealing with the cream of the crop. But, most of the time I would say I hear marketers talking about how they just want more leads and more scale. We had an example of a client who they needed to collect someone's net worth. And obviously, we can't target by net worth on LinkedIn. So what we did is we created a net worth drop down manually. And we'd give ranges would be like $0 to $200,000, and $200,000 to $1,000,000 and then all of those different ranges, and then that's a manual field that they have to fill out. And so if that is a requirement that they have a high net worth or a low net worth, you do get that data from the form field. So I hope that answers your question. Hopefully, it's helpful. Ben Milsom asks, "Dynamic URL parameters. Facebook ads has a ton of quality of life features that blow LinkedIn out of the water. I know it's a larger platform. One feature I miss the most is dynamic UTMs." Ben, I totally agree with you. I have been wanting dynamic URL parameters for so so long, I hope I'm not breaking any sort of confidences by saying this. But the good news is, this is coming. LinkedIn knows that it's a high priority and they've reassured me on several occasions that this is on the roadmap, and it's coming. I don't know if that means it's two months out, or two years out. If I had to predict I would guess something like six months. Then Nayan Prakash says, "If I take an example of sponsored Inmail ads, the only challenging part is to identify those audiences who have opened the message ads. I know LinkedIn doesn't give any option to populate a list based on openers. What's your thought?" Nyad, I hope I'm saying your name right. You're absolutely right, we get opens from message ads and conversation ads, but we don't have the ability to retarget people by whether they've done that or not. And honestly, an open is something that is so low in commitment that I don't expect them to ever give that to us, I would sure expect something like if they clicked on anything, like within a conversation ad if they clicked on any of the options, I could see that or at least clicked on a positive option, or clicked on the call to action from a message ad. I mean, the more engagement retargeting options that we get, the easier it's going to be to justify using LinkedIn campaign manager for retargeting. The more audiences the better, which is really going to help when cookies are dead here in the next year. One little bit of warning here is that message ads in general have something like a 55% open rate. But my gut tells me that a large portion of them and I don't know how many, but a large proportion are opening it just to mark the messages read so that it's not calling their attention as they're looking at their inbox. Probably the best thing you could do in this case, if you're trying to build a retargeting audience of those who've engaged is probably use a conversation ad, and then try to trigger the lead generation form to pop up because you know, you can retarget anyone who triggered a lead gen form opening. Obviously not in a tricky or a spammy way, but that's probably the best way to do it. I wish we could insert a video into one of these ads and then retarget video viewers, but lead gen forms are probably the best you're gonna get. Okay, Quentin Clair says, "Targeting efficiently, small audiences in niche markets versus needing critical mass to perform." Quentin, these are great points. For the bit about audience sizes, go and check out episode 20 of this podcast. But the bit about critical mass to performance totally depends on your definition of performance. For example, for us, we probably wouldn't be very happy with an account that was spending less than like $5,000 a month. But to some marketer, if they had a $1,000 or $2,000 a month budget, they would be fine spending that over the course of three months and being patient, and they would call that performance. So for us, we would suggest if you're targeting in North America, making sure that you have a budget of at least $5,000 a month. We find that usually your AB tests become statistically significant to the conversion level so you get a statistically significant cost per lead, and a conversion rate after spending $5,000. We also recommend audience sizes of 20,000 to 80,000 per campaign. But that doesn't mean that you can't have a much smaller or a much larger target audience size. It's just if you have a really large total addressable market, we would break that audience down into segments of 20,000 to 80,000 people. But if you're smaller than that, that's totally fine. running campaigns with 300 people in them is totally fine. It's just not going to spend very much and may or may not be worth your time, depending on what your time's worth, or what you consider to be highperformance. Small audiences maybe won't spend much but the value of dripping something out to your ideal market over time is still a lot more value than not showing at all. So it might be worth running some of these small audiences Hope that helps. Alright, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up so stick around 35:03 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 35:14 If you have any of the same questions that our community members had, go and listen to the episodes that are recommended around those topics, those will be super helpful. We'll have links down below in the show notes. Also, if you are new to LinkedIn Ads, or you have a colleague who is or someone that you're trying to train, check out the link in the show notes for the LinkedIn Learning course that I did in partnership with LinkedIn. It is an extremely good course if I don't say so myself being the author and it's also really inexpensive compared to anything else that you'd find out there, especially for the quality. LinkedIn Learning does a really good job. And of course, look down at your podcast player. If that subscribe button isn't already lit up, hit it for me, especially if you want to hear this in the future. If you don't leave it off, that's fine. Please do rate and review the podcast in whatever player you use or podcast platform. Any review, I'll give you a shout out and it is very, very much appreciated to help get the show shown to all the other ad professionals out there who need it. And of course, with any show feedback or questions or suggestions, shoot us an email at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.   Show Transcript You've seen that button hiding off to the right in campaign manager called performance chart. What does it do? And why do I love it so dang much? Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. Well, if you're anything like us, you're constantly testing and tweaking and adjusting things to improve your ad performance. That means you'll need to see your KPIs change over time. You can do this in Excel with pivot tables and pivot charts. But that tends to take a lot of time, and it's really monotonous. And if I've learned anything, it's that if something is cumbersome or time consuming, it's naturally not going to happen as often as it really needs to. Luckily, the performance chart option in campaign manager is surprisingly powerful and easy to access. So today, I'm going to walk you through exactly how to access it, and how to use it to improve your ad performance. First, the news. This week, I had a LinkedIn Product Manager reach out to me after listening to the last episode about boosted posts, and corrected me on something. He said, all ads created on LinkedIn go through the ad review process to ensure that the ad is adhering to the LinkedIn Ad policy. There are two types of review methods that we use. AI Model Review, this can happen almost instantaneously where ads are immediately approved. When this review happens, your ads can be published almost instantaneously. But it's only done for ads, where the AI model on LinkedIn side has a high confidence in its decision that the ads don't have any sort of an issue in them. If the model's confidence is low, then the ad is sent for human review. And during human review, he said this process can take between 24 to 48 hours. So I wanted to throw that out there as a retraction. I also want to say I've seen the human review take up to 72 hours. And I see this especially on text ads, usually sponsored content tends to get published a lot faster. Okay, I wanted to highlight a review that came in Swimmer 10 said, "Great show. Thanks, AJ, we are listening. I love your show and have missed it. Can't wait to see more shows this year. Thanks for the great content." Thank you so much Swimmer 10 It's always great to hear the feedback that you're listening and that you appreciate the episodes. We should be releasing episodes a lot more regularly. Now, we actually have a member on our team who is committed to helping me get these episodes out more often. So hopefully, you'll see a lot more coming. And of course, I want to feature you please do go and leave a public review. And I just heard that Spotify is now accepting reviews. We have a whole lot on Apple Podcasts, but I would absolutely love it If you guys would be able to go out of your way. You'd be doing me a huge favor to go on to Spotify and leave a review there. And of course, anything I see all give you guys a shout out. Alright, on to the topic at hand, let's hit it. It's pretty rare when LinkedIn does a feature better than Facebook. But every once in a while this happens, I can actually count on two fingers, the number of times this has happened. But years and years ago, LinkedIn Ads had a feature that I and many other advertisers really, really liked. The first thing that you saw when you logged into your dashboard was a customizable chart with the ad performance tables down below. And one of my biggest complaints about Facebook has always been the difficulty in visualizing your ad performance over time with trends. Well, then LinkedIn redesigned the platform to become much, much more Facebook like when they released objectives in 2019. And unfortunately, one of the features that disappeared was the chart, despite it actually being way way more helpful than the way that Facebook handled it before. Thankfully, it didn't die entirely. It still lives on the platform, although now it takes an extra couple clicks to get to. So what it is is a performance chart that you can tell it exactly what kinds of metrics you want to see and over what time period. Whether you want to analyze campaigns, campaign groups, or even individual ads, you can just simply select them in your normal campaign manager view. And then look for the button in the top right that says performance chart. Or if you don't select anything, or filter anything from campaign manager, it's just going to plot your aggregate performance for whatever you're looking at in campaign manager at that moment. So once you open the chart, you'll notice along the top that it will say Display Clicks. You're almost always going to want to click that and pick some other metric to look at because clicks is about the least helpful metric I can think of to start with. You'll notice that you can see metrics like your clicks, your impressions, and your spend. But raw counts of things like clicks and impressions really aren't helpful without context. And I'll give you an example. If I told you that I have an account that got eight clicks yesterday. You just tell me Is that good or bad? Well, of course, you're gonna say, Well, I don't know, what's their budget? Did they have 16 clicks the day before? Do they have a multi million dollar monthly budget? Or are they only budgeting for four clicks? So that would be a problem. So how do you make these metrics helpful in really any context. The easy way to do it is you turn them into a percentage, you divide it by something and make it a ratio. So anytime I'm in the performance chart, one of the first things I'm going to go for is I'm going to change display clicks to average click through rate, or cost per click, or cost per lead, or cost per conversion. I will say the one simple metric that isn't a ratio, or percentage that I do find helpful is your total spent. And this can be helpful for budgeting. You can see how much you're spending by day, you can see if that decreases or increases over weekends. So, I do still like total spent that basically every other metric there, I only care about if it's a percentage. Now I mentioned that you could select different campaigns or ads or even campaign groups before you click on performance chart. But one thing that we've really enjoyed watching is you can actually put a search filter into the search box in campaign manager. And then anything that matches that search filter is automatically going to be included in your performance chart. So for instance, anytime that we're running lead generation form ads, we always put LF in the campaign's name. And then that means if we wanted to chart performance of lead gen form campaigns, we could just go to the search box and just type LF. And then we can hit performance chart. And it's only going to show the performance of those filtered campaigns. The same thing goes with ad types. If I want to look at just my text ad campaigns, I'm always going to put TA in the campaign name to tell me which ad format I'm using. And so if I type TA it'll filter there. This is really helpful because if you combine text ads with any other ad format, your average click through metrics are going to become totally useless. And that's because text ads have such a low click through rate compared to every other ad format. So whatever you have in your campaign names, you can use here as a filter, so you can try to get them into the performance chart. A really cool feature I like is that if you're charting multiple campaigns or multiple ads, there's a little switch in the upper left that says aggregate. You can flip it off to disaggregate those campaigns or ads, and then it will show you a separate trendline for each campaign or ad that you're looking at. And this is really helpful to look at, but realize you can only disaggregate if you have three or fewer campaigns or three or fewer ads that you're looking at. So that's a little bit of a limitation. But I like using this if I want to compare different audience segments against each other. So for instance, I could go and increase my bids a static amount, or a set percentage across several different campaigns where the targeting was the same, but they're just different by their seniority levels. If I increase two campaigns by 50 cents a piece, did my manager segment increase as much as my director segment that might tell me if one of these segments is more competitive than the other? Another test that would be really fun is wondering if, after pausing a campaign and then unpausing it later, after a certain amount of time, does it cause the ads to go back into the learning phase for LinkedIn's auction? It'd be interesting to find out if time being paused affects which one is selected as the winner and therefore receives more impressions. Any other ideas for cool tests you guys have, please share it with us. Send us an email at Podcast@B2Linked.com. I'd absolutely love to hear from you what you're doing. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll get to dive into the limitations and the gotchas of the performance chart. The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you, B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $150 million dollars on the platform, and no one outperforms us at getting you the lowest cost per lead and the most scale. We're official LinkedIn partners, and you'll deal only with LinkedIn Ads experts from day one. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to chat about your campaigns, We'd absolutely love to get to work with you. Alright, let's jump into the weaknesses and limitations here. In my mind, the biggest weakness of the performance chart is that we can't overlay metrics on top of each other. Thankfully you can do it if you need to. But, the way that you do it is you have to go in export your data by day or by month, or whatever sort of granularity you care about, but usually by day, and export it into Excel, where you can actually build your own helpful chart. If I could do this, here are a few ideas of what I would want to do. For instance, I would chart total spent on the same chart as costs per click so I can see how maybe small bid changes affect how much the account spends in total, that could help me in predicting what a bid change might do for my budget for the month. I would also like to chart costs per click on the same chart as cost per lead, or cost per conversion, if you're using the website conversions. And then maybe after something like a bid increase, I could see if increasing bids 20%, did it result in a 20% increase in my cost per lead, or maybe bidding higher would give me access to a more valuable audience, in which case, my conversion rate could be higher and I might spend 20% more, but have a cost per lead that comes in maybe only 10% more. I haven't found this type of thing to happen on LinkedIn, but it's sure nice to compare and see if we can learn how the platform is handling our individual bids and all that. I also think it would be fun to chart cost per click on the same chart as conversion rate. And that would allow us to do something like test to see if bidding more aggressively reaches an audience that's more likely to convert or if it's unaffected. Another weakness is that the performance chart can't aggregate more than 300 campaigns or ads at a time. So if you have a large account, let's say you have 500 campaigns, you'd either have to export it to Excel and do it manually, or just analyze in smaller batches, or by ad format, or by some smaller segment that you have. It's not going to show you the data and combine it if you have more than 300 entities in there. Another weakness is that if you're using lead gen forms, it will let you chart your cost per lead, but it doesn't give you the option of your conversion rate, which I think is arguably more important, since it wouldn't be swayed by your bid, or any cost changes, or increases in competition on the platform from your competitors. Same thing goes with cost per conversion. There is a metric for cost per conversion, but you don't have the ability to choose conversion rate. Even if we did have conversion rate, we know that LinkedIn's definition of a conversion, a website conversion, is is skewed. What they do is they combine both your view through conversions and your post click conversions into that one column of conversions, which I don't think is helpful because so much of the time your view through conversions are much, much higher than your actual conversions or form fills that would have come in, especially if you're running text ads, they tend to rack up the view through conversions. So even if we had it, it probably wouldn't be very helpful. But, we can still do this in Excel. The LinkedIn product team likes to use a phrase that says if you could wave a magic wand and change the product, what would you want it to be able to do. And I know that LinkedIn listens to the podcast. So here I'll say, hey, LinkedIn team, consider this my voice of the customer feedback session for the performance chart. Here's my wish list of the top three things that I wish I could do with the performance chart. Number one, I want to be able to overlay different metrics on top of each other, like we talked about before, where I could show a trend line for total spent, at the same time as a trend line for cost per click, or cost per lead. Wishlist item number two, what I wouldn't give to see bids or budgets here on there. We could see what day a bid or a budget was increased or decreased. And then what sort of effect it had on the rest of the campaign for that day. This really could function as an account change history, which by the way, all other ad platforms have and LinkedIn still doesn't. We can see certain changes on the account and when they happen. Bids and budgets would be really interesting. I'd love to see quality score or relevancy score at the same time. So that would all be really, really helpful, but of course, I still would love and account change history. Please, please, please give us that. Wishlist item number three, I would like to customize my own metrics. So for instance, when I'm using sponsored messaging ad formats, it doesn't make sense to compare click through rates against any other ad format, because of the way that LinkedIn defines a click with sponsored messaging. LinkedIn calls an open have one of these ad formats as a click. And so when you see your click through rate, it will say like a 55% click through rate, but of course, that is not the case. Generally, these ad formats have around a 3% click through rate and so the difference between a 55% click through rate and a 3% is giant. So what I would do is I would go and create a custom KPI in the dashboard to rename cliques. And I would say the new definition for a click is clicks plus sponsored messaging clicks minus sponsored messaging opens. And then I would also create a new click through rate metric based on that so I could compare click through rates across all ad formats and have the same definition. I could calculate a cost per click that works regardless of which ad format you're using. Alright, keeping it short and sweet today, 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. Hey, LinkedIn Ads fanatics. I hope you enjoyed that episode. Here's some great resources you're going to love. First off, I did the course with LinkedIn Learning about LinkedIn Ads. It's really an intro into everything LinkedIn Ads. It's fantastic if you're just barely getting into the channel, or newer to the platform and they're looking for a resource to learn from. It's incredibly inexpensive. There's a link right there down below in the show notes. So definitely check that out if you're in that situation. If this is your first time listening or heck, your 50th, but you're still not subscribed, please do look down at your podcast player right now, hit that subscribe button. I'd love to have you back here next week. And if you like what you hear, please do rate and review. Especially go to the Spotify page for the podcast and leave reviews there. That would be the most helpful because that's brand new and honestly, you'd be helping us out a ton by getting us out to more and more audiences to people who want to know more or the right way to do things on LinkedIn Ads. With any show feedback or episodes or topics you'd like us to cover, please do email us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.   Show Transcript On LinkedIn, what's a boosted post? And how is it different from a standard LinkedIn ad? What is direct sponsored content? When should you use them? We're going to discuss all of this in this episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! I get the question from advertisers probably monthly about boosted posts, dark posts on LinkedIn and I think we're going to be getting it a lot more often with the moves that LinkedIn is making. It really is a pretty simple question with some mostly simple answers, but also a lot to unpack and a lot of nuances. So here we go. First of all, I hope everyone had an amazing holiday season and break no matter what you celebrate. My kids and I had a really fun Christmas where we stayed home and relaxed. I'm really excited to be back sharing all of my favorite tips and tricks on LinkedIn ads with you, of course, and hopefully we're back to a weekly cadence here. Thanks for your patience with me. And I hope you all have an amazing 2022 advertising on LinkedIn. All right, let's hit it. First, we need to define what a boosted post is. Because this is something that Facebook actually pioneered, and then of course, LinkedIn adopted later. What it is, it's where you create a company page post organically and then you push that post out in your ad campaigns as an ad. When LinkedIn very first released sponsored content back in 2013, it was called Sponsored Updates. And boosting posts like Facebook has, were the only option. I was so proud to be one of the pilot users and in fact, I was so early of a user that LinkedIn actually gave us 1000s of dollars in free adspend just for running them and giving them feedback. Oh, boy, those were the days. At the time, I had launched 32 campaigns. So of course, that meant I had to go and create 64 sponsored content ads, no big deal, right? Well, at the time, I had no bulk tools. So I put headphones on, I locked it in and I just crank them out at about one per minute doing copy, paste, post. Copy, paste post. Not the most glorious work, but let's be honest, everyone listening here is too highly compensated to do so many of the tasks that LinkedIn's Ads platform makes us do on the regular. I was very used to it by this time. The ads of course performed really, really well. Surprise, surprise, it was the first time that anyone had seen an ad that looked like this on LinkedIn, because everything was just text ads before it. There was a pretty significant downside to this strategy, though. Because as I went through and created 64 organic company page posts in a row, I realized how confusing this must be to our company page followers. You see a company page post that looks eerily like an ad and you brush it off, you're not interested. And then a few posts down, there's another one that looks exactly the same, then another, than another. The most active of our followers, we're getting inundated by the same message. This was also really problematic for my tracking and attribution. Because like a good technical marketer, I had specific URL tracking parameters in each of those ads, so I could associate their performance with their ad spend. The problem is that this wasn't a very pure test. A company page follower might see this post and then convert, and then someone in my advertising audience saw it and converted. And you look at both of those conversions, they are at very different stages of the funnel and they are very different audiences. The company page follower already has a high degree of affinity for your brand. They're following you, they're fans maybe, and watching them convert, they're going to convert at a much higher rate. They're going to be a much more highly qualified lead as opposed to someone in a cold audience who saw my ad and then converted, these are just very different. And of course, this was all before conversion tracking came out on the platform. So by the time that these leads, made it into the CRM, my test results were dirty, I couldn't count on them anymore. And of course, at this time, Facebook already had a solution for this. Facebook had dark posts where you could create 10s or even hundreds of ads at a time. And they wouldn't inundate or muddy tracking because these were ads that were not exposed publicly. They were shown only to the users who were being expressly targeted by the advertisers ads. And I gave this feedback to LinkedIn as I'm sure many of the other Alpha participants did, and told him we just couldn't continue using these boosted posts because it was hurting our brand organically. I'm still shocked that it was less than a year, but in July of 2014, LinkedIn released Direct Sponsored Content is what they called it, or DSC for short. I'm sure that we're all used to the fact that LinkedIn releases the same features that are found on other platforms. But then of course, they have to give it their own name. So that was DSC or Direct Sponsored Content. That term is very non descriptive of what it actually is. And so I'm really glad about this, but little by little over the years, LinkedIn has started to adopt the same terminology that Facebook uses. I'll hear LinkedIn reps regularly talk about dark posts, or boosting, which is definitely Facebook's terminology. Thank you, Thank you LinkedIn for this. When you've got a good thing, there's no need to reinvent the wheel. There's no shame in using Facebook terminology here on these small issues. Alright, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into why you might not want to use Direct Sponsored Content, 5:56 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. 6:06 If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you, B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $140 million on LinkedIn Ads, and no one outperforms us on getting you the lowest cost per lead, and the highest scale. We're official LinkedIn partners and you'll only deal with LinkedIn ads experts from day one. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com, we'd love to chat with you about your campaigns. Alright, now let's jump into the Direct Sponsored Content versus boosted posts. Okay, so catching you up in July of 2014, LinkedIn released this ability to create dark posts or direct sponsored content. And what that lets us do is now we can publish ads directly within the ad platform. And the only people who will see them are those who are part of our advertising audience. This takes care of all of the issues I had with where I was muddying my tracking, my analytics, as well as totally inundating my organic audience. The one exception is that when rarely, someone creates some sort of a social action on an ad, which causes viral reach of that ad to people who are their first degree network, but this rarely happens. So most of the time, your ads are really only being shown to those that you're paying to get in front of. Even if it is viral, though, just remember that traffic is free. So it's It's gravy anyway, it might muddy your conversion numbers slightly, but usually not very much. Okay, so when someone is using a boosted post, you can go right to their company page, you always have been able to, and you can look right at their ads, right alongside all their other company page posts. But it's interesting to note that when they are using Direct Sponsored Content, you can still see their ads. You have to visit their company page, and then click on their posts. And then you have to click the ads filter. That will let you see all of their sponsored content for the last six months. Thank you again, LinkedIn, we love this feature. Okay, so those are the major benefits of direct sponsored content. But there can be some really good reasons not to use Direct Sponsored Content, and just use boosted posts instead. The three reasons I've come up with and if you have others, I would love for you to share them in case I forgot something here. The first reason is to preserve the social proof across your ads. The second is simplicity, if you just don't care about tracking. And the third, they don't go through the same review process as Direct Sponsored Content. Alright, so diving in deeply here, the first one about preserving social proof. So LinkedIn ads falls behind almost all of the major ad platforms in feature set. And here's a great example of something that we advertisers have been asking for for years that LinkedIn still hasn't addressed. So when you go to create a Sponsored Content ad on LinkedIn, you have two choices, you can either create a boosted post, where your tracking will be messed up, it'll be dirty, because you've got your organic audience and your paid audience seeing the same ad. But you do get to preserve your social proof. So any ad where you can see the likes and the comments, if the same ad is shared by multiple campaigns, or maybe the ad has even run organically, before it became an ad. Everyone who has served that ad gets to see these likes and comment count. That of course is going to give them a little bit of a warm feeling that oh, they're not alone here. They're not being tricked. Lots of people are getting value out of this ad. Your other option is to go with Direct Sponsored Content, where each individual ad that you create starts back out at zero social proof. And I'm sure many of us know, getting that first like or that first comment on an ad is really difficult. No one wants to be the first one. But once you have one or two, then it really starts to ramp up. This is a pretty significant downside. But the real upside here is that the tracking link allows you near perfect attribution of exactly which ad and which audience led to that closed deal when it makes it into your CRM. Now because there are significant pros and cons to both approaches, you're going to have to decide which one you choose. Here at B2Linked, we've decided that tracking is more important to us than social proof, simply due to the power of our internal reporting tools. And feel free to ask me about the reporting tools anytime because I love to geek out on this stuff. The second good reason to use a boosted post is for simplicity if you don't care about tracking. So if you don't know what I'm talking about when I say tracking parameters in your URL, or when I talk about UTM parameters, then you should be on the lookout for a future episode, where we're going to go way deep into tracking. But you should also do yourself a career favor and go and look them up. I've said that for years technical marketers are the ones that won't be replaced by AI, or will be immune to being replaced by their younger up and coming generation of marketers. That being said, if you don't care about tracking parameters, then the easiest path for you to launch ads will be with boosted posts, or simply using dark posts still, but just sponsoring that same dark post to several different ad campaigns, just that you get to reuse that same ad creative and not have to create a whole bunch of new ads. And finally, here's a little ninja tip that boosted posts don't go through the same review process. This is helpful in one little situation where let's say you keep launching ads. And LinkedIn keeps disapproving them for whatever reason. We had a client who was advertising a wine industry consortium. Our ads kept getting disapproved because they mentioned wine. And LinkedIn has a rule against promoting alcohol, after multiple attempts at getting LinkedIn to appeal their decision and overturn it. Because obviously, we weren't advertising alcohol, we were advertising an industry event, we finally just decided to launch the ads as boosted posts. And since boosted posts are already public on a company page, they don't go through the same approval process and review process, we were able to launch the ads and run. But it is important to note that this isn't a way to cheat LinkedIn's ad approval. If we were actually advertising wine or alcohol, or something else offensive or blatantly against the rules, the community would have reported our ads and LinkedIn still would have come and rejected them. But this was just more of a workaround when LinkedIn reviewers were simply not having a follow the spirit of the law and not the letter of the law kind of day. Alright, 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. All right, I hope you enjoyed that episode. It was short, but sweet. Now, if you are just getting into LinkedIn Ads, or if you have a colleague or a friend who is you'll definitely want to point them towards the LinkedIn Learning course that I did with LinkedIn Learning. The link is right here in the show notes and it's incredibly affordable compared to any other LinkedIn Ads course out there. And the quality is fantastic, if I do say so myself. LinkedIn Learning really does a great job. Make sure to look down at your podcast player right now and hit the subscribe button so you don't miss any of our future episodes. And whatever podcast player you listen to, or service you use, please do rate the podcast and leave a review. If you leave a review. I'll shout you out live on the episode. Well, not really live, but you get the idea. With any ideas for future podcast episodes, any topics you'd like us to cover, clarification, anything like that, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week, hopefully, cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Benchmark Episode Slide of benchmarks and hurdles NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.   Show Transcript One of the most important skills that you can learn as you're managing LinkedIn Ads campaigns. That's right. We're talking about troubleshooting your ad performance. Let's do it. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. I'm really excited about the topic today. And I have a special guest that I want to introduce you to. But before that, a quick story about why this topic is so important to me. So back while I was working on my undergrad at Brigham Young University here in Utah, I got a job doing tech support. And it was like second level tech support. So a little bit techier than what I was used to. And I was responsible for internet connections and servers for 30,000 or more locations. I've always been really good with computers, but the topic of internet and modems and networks was all new to me at this point. So I went through the training process and I did my best to do what I could which was memorizing the different tactics of ways you can fix things. And you techies will probably appreciate this part. I found that it was pretty common to reboot the router or the modem and that would work to restore their internet connection. Have you tried turning it off and on again? Hello, IT? Have you tried turning it off and on again? AJ Wilcox 3:09 I also found that sometimes computers had proxy settings erroneously set up in the browsers. On one of my first calls that I ever had with a customer, unbeknownst to me, my manager was listening to the call, I was super nervous and I was asking the customer to try everything. We were rebooting modems and routers, we were checking proxy settings, we were all over the board. My manager right after the call, he called me into his office, and he taught me a principle that would serve me my entire life. He taught me that throwing every tactic I knew at the problem was super inefficient. And that the much better way to do this would be to systematically test through the system. In the case of computer networking, he taught me that you can either work from the outside to the inside, which would be like checking the internet connection to the building first, and then moving to the router to see if it's working, and then to each computer. Or you can work from the inside to the outside. So check the computer status first, and then move to the router, then move to the modem. And he taught me that it didn't matter which direction you started from, but that the most important thing was ruling out the tactics that wouldn't be useful and helpful to try in our troubleshooting. That skill of systematic testing is something that I took with me into digital marketing and I count it as being one of the most important skills that I could have had and I would recommend that any other marketer can have. Today's guest is going to teach us how to apply these same troubleshooting and testing strategies to your marketing which will make you an infinitely better advertising professional, especially on LinkedIn where the stakes are just quite honestly higher due to the high costs. Let's hit it. Alright everyone, I'm super excited to introduce you to Parker Williams, who's on our team. He is one of B2Linked's most senior account managers. He's built and sold his own company. He grew a startup software company from zero to 1 million in ARR, he's married with two kids, lives in Mesa, Arizona, and if he's not working, he's either mountain biking or riding his dirt bike. Parker, so excited to have you here. Thanks for coming on. Parker Williams 5:13 Man, it's a pleasure, AJ. Happy to be here. AJ Wilcox 5:16 Alright, so maybe give us the backstory here. The topic that we're talking about today is troubleshooting. Why did you feel like this was such an important topic? And why did you volunteer to hop on to get grilled by me? Parker Williams 5:27 Yeah, no, that's a great question. I feel like my career in marketing or as a marketer really pivoted when I started to understand the process of troubleshooting because, you know, I think back to early days, when I got into marketing, marketing my own company when things went wrong, which they always do, I always approached it with a process of like, throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks which to some people that might work, but it didn't work for me. I would freak out, I get nervous or running advertising campaigns, like, you kind of panic, and you start making decisions that are not good when things don't go right. And so I feel like once I understood the process of troubleshooting an ad campaign, sales campaign, it was pivotal for my career as a marketer, I started to excel and started to find areas to improve, and I started to see success faster than previously. So I feel like it's crucial, very crucial. AJ Wilcox 6:29 I totally agree. I think as a marketer, you really can advance. You can have great positions by just throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks, right? My personal feeling on it is, if you actually understand the process right from beginning to end, you understand what makes a difference where, you're thinking more strategically as a marketer, and less tactics focused. And I think ultimately, that makes us a much better marketer because you can see the whole picture. Parker Williams 6:56 Yeah, exactly. It becomes an engineering and science game versus like, a guessing game, you know, you know exactly what to do to improve an ad campaign or not necessarily know what to do, but you know what to focus on next. And because it didn't work, doesn't mean it's not going to work. And so being able to troubleshoot something it's way better. It's just so much more, it's more fun to me when you approach it that way. AJ Wilcox 7:26 Same here, I've said this before, but basically, every time I run a test, doing something with LinkedIn Ads, despite the fact that I've got 10 plus years of experience, I feel like I'm really good and comfortable on the platform, I still am going to fail half the time, right? And most of us don't want to admit that, but everything we do in marketing is a test. So if you're going to be testing things, but you don't know what your inputs are, what your levers are, you're probably going to be running some pretty risky campaigns. Parker Williams 7:56 Right? I heard an advertiser I think was Frank Kern. He's like a big time advertiser, marketer. He mentioned one time, like if if marketing worked every time like we'd all be, it would be easy. Everybody would be millionaires, and super rich, and like, we would never have any issues. But this is not the case with marketing. It never works the first time. Sometimes it does, but it rarely does. And like being able to troubleshoot things that don't work, like that's a game changer. That's a huge game changer. AJ Wilcox 8:30 It is. It takes it from an art where only a few people are skilled and turns it into a science where right anyone can follow a repeatable process. I love that. So maybe share with us a specific experience where you had to troubleshoot and walk us through that process. What you thought about what it took. Parker Williams 8:47 Yeah, that's a great question. So you know, initially, when I came on and started helping manage ad accounts at B2Linked, one of the things that was stressful to me was, click through rates. Getting click through rates above our benchmark, which was 0.4%. And I remember I was assigned a client, they're called Asahi Kasei, they're a big Japanese company. Our click through rates were a bit low and I didn't know what to do. I didn't know how to get him up. AJ actually gave a training on troubleshooting and showed the process of how to fix problems or solve problems in advertising. He presented us levers that you can pull at certain points or certain hurdles that you're experiencing. And so in this case, my click through rates were low. And I knew from that training that I had certain levers I could pull to improve that click through rate and so one of the things we tested was the headlines and the intro text or they were text ads in this case. And so we started to tailor our ad copy to be more industry specific and we saw a dramatic increase in our our click through rates. I think we went from like, they were text ads, so they were less than .04 percent. We were like .01, .02 percent like really low, but our average click through rates went up above .04 percent, which was a game winner for their ads. AJ Wilcox 10:10 And for the uninitiated, that is basically it's almost two times the average for text ads. So we took something that was performing below benchmark, and then doubled LinkedIn to benchmark with it. That's pretty awesome. Right? So this might sound a little bit silly, but why did you decide based on knowing that the click through rates were having an issue? Why didn't you go and make changes to the landing page or recommend a different offer? Or, you know, why did you go right for the headline in the description? Parker Williams 10:38 Yeah, so I think that goes to kind of the process of, you know, troubleshooting, what is it? And how do you prioritize what things you need to fix? And so, you know, I chose click through rate initially, because that was our first hurdle. And then I had listed from that training, different levers we could pull to improve it, or improve or overcome that hurdle. And I prioritized ad copy because that was the initial contact point. And so I knew that that would be the priority. The landing page, in this case, it was a follower ad. So there wasn't really a landing page, but if there was a landing page, like it wouldn't improve that click through rate, it wouldn't impact it. So I chose the headline, because that's what people are engaging with, or the audience was engaging with. I knew it would impact it more than changing the audience. I guess that was another lever, like before changing the audience, which is a lot of work. We could test something minor and quick. So that was a big reason. AJ Wilcox 11:44 Yeah. So it sounds like a silly question. But those are the kinds of things you might do as a marketer, if you didn't know what levers you could pull to get better performance, you might just say, Oh, I I know how to make landing pages convert better. I have a poor click through rate here, but let me go and work on the landing page and try to get better performance, when that's really not your pain. Can you walk us through? What are the hurdles that we face as advertisers? And maybe what are the levers that you can pull if we're stumbling over one of those hurdles? Parker Williams 12:14 Yeah, absolutely. Back to the point of which hurdles we pull on advertising, there's two main ones, which is click through rate and conversion rates. There's levers for each one. And a lot of times, they're very similar levers, like ad copy, or messaging, or audience or your call to action. Those are some examples of levers you can pull. The click through rate, we can discuss what those levers are and then we can discuss what the conversion rate levers are next. So the first levers I usually look at when it comes to click through rate is ad copy. So your intro text, your headline, or your image text, right, your image ad copy. The next thing I'll look at or consider is the image, you know, is the image engaging. Is it interesting? Does it look too ad-ish? Does it capture people's attention? So that's the next thing I'll usually test. The other library you have is that you can pull is the offer, the actual offer that you're advertising. So if you're advertising an E-book or a white paper, what exactly is that offer? Is it enticing enough to get your individual, your audience to engage with you? I don't usually go to that offer, or I don't go to that level until I've tested everything because to change an offer, that's a lot of work. So before changing the offer, I'll even test the audience. Maybe our audiences just slightly off, maybe we're not targeted enough. Or maybe we're too broad. So those are the levers I typically pull when it comes to click through rates. Conversion rates, they're going to be similar. AJ Wilcox 13:50 Actually, let's stop right there. What is the punishment you receive as an advertiser if your click through rates aren't great? Parker Williams 13:57 Yeah, that's a great question. To answer that question, it can be pretty in depth or it can be pretty simple. If your click through rate is low, let's say 0%. You're not getting any clicks. Right? That's the first terrible thing that can happen. But if you are getting clicks, let's say you're getting .2% click through rate. And from that same ad, targeting that same audience if you double that, so let's say .2 and a half percent if you double that, it's 5.5% click through rate, you just doubled your clicks from the same amount of impressions. And so your efficiency just doubled with that one ad. We can go into depth on that, but it's it's pretty simple at the same time, like poor click through rate like your gate to the ad performance is not opened all the way. It's like not performing at all. AJ Wilcox 15:00 And then I think if you are bidding by the impression, let's say you are using LinkedIn to auto bidding, literally, you just reach twice the number of people for the same cost. I mean, literally, when you say you doubled efficiency, it's true. But if you are bidding by the click, you're basically like trying to bribe LinkedIn to get them to show your ads. If you have a .2% click through rate. It's like, alright, LinkedIn then I'll try bidding $15, will you show me then? What if I bid $20. And on the other hand, if you've doubled that, and now you're at like the .5%, you can bid down significantly, you're paying so much less for the traffic. And of course, it matters in your scale, and it matters in your ads efficiency. So I think that's a really good example. Parker Williams 15:45 It's also kind of like a faucet, like everyone uses a faucet everyday when they brush their teeth, right? If you turn on your faucet, just a tiny bit, and you had drips coming out, that's kind of like a 0.1% click through rate, and you got to wash off your toothbrush, like you can't do that with drips. And so if you increase that click through rate, and you open your faucet more, you're gonna get more clicks, and it's going to achieve your goal faster, you're gonna be able to test faster, you're going to be able to prove your offer faster, you're going to be able to, you're gonna have way more data to work with. So I always think of faucets when I think of click through rate, like, that's your faucet to your funnel. So if your click through rates are low, like, you're not gonna have any data for conversions, which is the next hurdle. AJ Wilcox 16:27 Oh, so true. And I love that metaphor, because I can imagine, if you're trying to wash your toothbrush out with drips, think of how many toothbrushes you can wash when the faucets going full blast, I mean, several can be under there, that could be a whole bunch of different tests around. That leaves us really, really nicely to the second hurdle. So tell us about the second hurdle and tell us why it's important. And maybe what levers you'd be trying to pull to, to effect a change there. Parker Williams 16:53 Yeah, absolutely. So that the next hurdle is conversion rates. This can change quite a bit depending on where you're sending traffic to. I know there's a lot of native forums on LinkedIn now, even other platforms as well. If you're running traffic to like a lead form, the levers are going to be a little different. If you're running traffic to a landing page, the levers are going to be a little little different, but it's the same hurdle. And so let's just use the example of running traffic to a landing page. The levers you're going to pull there are going to be similar to click through rates. The first thing I like to check or prioritize is my ad copy on the landing page. Now, what is the messaging? Is it congruent with the ad, for example, if you're running an ad campaign for like the ultimate guide to LinkedIn advertising, and that's in your ad, and they come to a landing page, that's like the ultimate guide to Google advertising? What do you think's going to happen to that conversion rate, it's going to not be that great, because people that clicked on the ad came the landing page with the expectation to be served the Ultimate Guide to LinkedIn advertising. So messaging needs to be congruent with your ads to see good conversion rates. So that's usually what I like to test first, is the messaging on the landing page. The other lever that I moved to next is traffic, is the traffic clean that we're sending to the landing page. Is it the right audience, that's an easy lever to pull, it doesn't take a lot of effort to pull that. So the other lever is going to be your offer? Is your offer back to the ad campaign? Is it something that's irresistible to your audience? Are they going to be stupid for not saying yes to this offer, basically. So those are the typical levers we pull, you know, there are little tactical things, but I don't think those last they work and change all the time. But really, it's your offer, message, and audience that you need to focus on. AJ Wilcox 18:48 And what I want everyone to get out of this, if you've listened to me for any amount of time, you've heard me say that the offer is everything. Notice how when Parker was talking, the offer was actually a piece of the troubleshooting and the performance for both improving the click through rate and improving the conversion rate. Literally, it feels like you're pulling teeth, trying to get traffic on LinkedIn, your performance really sucks. Take a hard look at your offer. Because more often than not, when you've tested everything, and you just can't figure out like why are my ads not working? It's because the offer isn't attractive enough. Think of it from the perspective of your prospect. If they look at it, just like Parker said, is it irresistible? They would be stupid not to put their their information in to get this or is it something super high friction, like sign up for a trial or hop on the phone with a sales rep where it's scaring them away active, Parker Williams 19:43 Your audience temperature can play a big part in that too. And that's that goes to the to what you said earlier, like maybe the offer isn't positioned at the right time for that audience. So if you're targeting, like a LinkedIn Ad campaign we'll use that as an example. If you're targeting cold audience like, let's say your offers a free trial 30 day trial, no one knows likes or trust you, you're probably gonna have low conversion rates with with something like that. But if this audience has engaged with your content, they've raised their hand to other pieces of content that's created demand for your product or service. retargeting those people or putting uploading a list of those people and targeting them with a 30 day trial, you probably see higher conversion rates than you would with a cold audience. AJ Wilcox 20:35 Oh, very true. That know, like, and trust factor is ultra important. And if someone already knows likes and trusts you, they'll be open to a really high friction offer. But I think you have to earn that trust, you have to earn that like and so much of what we do, I think in terms of cold traffic, because so much of what we do on LinkedIn is reaching new audiences we haven't reached before. That's really really insightful. Here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into the rest of the interview, Speaker 4 21:02 the LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. AJ Wilcox 21:12 If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We spent over $140 million on LinkedIn ads, and no one outperforms us on getting you the lowest cost per lead and the maximum scale of your campaigns. We're official LinkedIn partners, and you'll only deal with LinkedIn Ads experts from day one, fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to chat about your campaigns. We'd absolutely love to work with you. All right, let's jump right back into the interview with Parker. So Parker, walk us through when you're inside of a LinkedIn account, you're inside of campaign manager, and you're looking to analyze some of these things, and decide what to test what to troubleshoot. Where are you looking? What are you doing? Teach us so that we can follow along? Parker Williams 21:57 Yeah, absolutely. I'll tell a story about this. So one of my responsibilities and B2Linked is consulting or helping. You can purchase consulting time with a director. And so I've had the opportunity to do that and one of the first things I do when someone asked me to take a look at their account is I pull up the campaign, or I go into the ad campaign group that we're running ads in, that we're wanting to focus on and improve. And I make sure that my timeframe is set to either 30 days or 90 days, I want as much data as I can initially to analyze the performance of the campaigns we're focusing on. And then depending on what offer, how you have your campaigns set up, I'll make sure that those campaigns are selected. And then the first thing I'm looking at is my click through rate. So back to troubleshooting, I'm going to I'm going to be in the campaign level, looking at all the campaigns. And looking at the average of the click through rate. Let's say it's one specific campaign, though, that we're wanting to look at, I'll make sure that I select that one campaign, so it pops it up in the the header bar, the campaign manager view. And that's usually where I go initially. And then, depending on your objective, if you're trying to get leads, if you're trying to get downloads, if you're trying to get followers, then I'll look at that conversion rate. And sometimes you'll have to export that data to be able to analyze that, depending on that objective. So that's kind of where I go initially. If I want to get into more information and a deeper dive, I'll export it to an Excel sheet, and then I'll run like pivot tables, and I'll do a little bit more digging so I can analyze the ad copy, the ad imagery, maybe the offers, if you've ran multiple offers. AJ Wilcox 23:52 I really, really liked what you said, I follow the same process, I will export from LinkedIn, and I will export specifically the ad data. But when I get it into Excel, I build my pivot table by campaign name. And that way I can look down the list and see, like you said, any campaign that sticks out as being a really poor performer, that's really what troubleshooting is looking for the poor performers right, then once I found a campaign, I'll break that campaign down to see the ads that make that up. And really often I'll find that there might be two ads or maybe four ads that have run inside that campaign. And one of them is actually doing really well but the other one or the other three are the actual poor performers. And so one quick thing we can do is just pause the poor performers and turn the best one backup or or back on if it were off. Parker Williams 24:46 After listening to you talk about that. I think there's a few key ingredients to troubleshooting that we need to discuss which would one of the first ones would be benchmarks, knowing your benchmarks and what to compare to troubleshooting is pretty useless if you don't have any benchmarks. AJ Wilcox 25:04 Great point, for those of you listening, Episode 15 of the podcast, and we'll link to it down below in the show notes. Episode 15 is all about benchmarks. And if you go and listen to that, you can compare your own performance against benchmarks to see where we are. Okay, keep going. Parker Williams 25:20 Yeah, so I feel like benchmarks are a key ingredient. And then we've talked about this already identifying being very specific on your hurdle, that's one of the other ingredients is knowing your hurdles. And the other key ingredients is, are the levers which we've discussed. So I just wanted to hit on making sure that you know your benchmarks, and you know your hurdles, and you know, your levers you can pull. And you've identified them, and you've listed them. I've got a noted document in my computer, I used to have it on a piece of paper, but I refer to it all the time. What are my hurdles? What are my benchmarks? And what's cool about this process is, it doesn't only work for LinkedIn Ads, but this also works for everything else you do in business, and even sometimes in life, which not to get off of the topic of LinkedIn Ads. But I've found myself with clients, I've had situations where I've, we've had great performing campaigns, like our front end is working really well, we're producing really good leads, we're producing really good click through rates. And it gets to the sales team. And they're coming back to us and saying, hey, we're not converting any of these. Well, before we point fingers at advertising and saying, hey, advertising is not working, because we're leads aren't converting. What's that next hurdle? And sometimes I can advise the sales team on what are the hurdles, what's the next thing that you're sending them? Is it an email or calling them like? I'm able to help them identify their next hurdle that they're dealing with. So if you're a marketer have a small team or a big team, being able to provide advice or direction for the sales team is also beneficial, and build your value that you add to the company, not just in advertising. AJ Wilcox 27:11 So true, you could be the very best LinkedIn Ads professional on the planet, and still totally fail if sales doesn't know how to how to handle your leads. Or if you don't have a good enough offer to advertise. I've said before, but you can only put so much lipstick on a pig and it's not getting any prettier. Right? I thought it'd be interesting to interject here. For those looking to troubleshoot the conversion rate hurdle. If you are running lead generation form campaigns, then what I like to do is, you will have a lead form open rate that's can be interesting. But more often than not, I'm just taking the number of leads and dividing it by the number of clicks to get a conversion rate. And that's really simple, but when you're running like a website visits campaign, for instance, or an engagement campaign, and you're running the conversion tracking on the website, LinkedIn's metrics won't tell you the whole picture though. They will seek to tell more of a picture than what it deserves. If you just look at the conversions column, it will show you a number of conversions. But if you go into your like leads and conversions view of campaign manager, you'll see that that number is actually made up of two different metrics. One is last click conversions, and one is view through conversions. And if you ask me, it's not right for LinkedIn to claim the view through conversions. Those are basically conversions that occurred from a different marketing channel of yours that LinkedIn knows that that member saw at least one of your ads in the last, you know, 30 days or seven days, whatever you set your window to. So anytime I'm doing this analysis, I don't use LinkedIn's conversions column, I specifically pull the column that is last click conversions. Those will tell you the ones the conversions that actually came because of clicking one of your ads. Parker Williams 29:05 I love it. The data LinkedIn provides is a little skewed sometimes. That's another key ingredient to troubleshooting is making sure you're you're pulling the right clicks. Because LinkedIn, we've learned this, LinkedIn says if you look at the original view and campaign manager and you look at clicks, those are all clicks to your landing page. They're not all clicks to your lead form. Sometimes they're clicking share, like, or the see more if your text is long. So that's not actually true click through rate. So making sure, like initially when I look at an account, I just quickly glance at that click through rate. But if I want to really know what the number is, I'm exporting the data into an Excel sheet and looking at it that way. AJ Wilcox 29:53 I so agree. Knowing the definitions of what each of the metrics mean is really really important. Case in point, if you're running any of the sponsored messaging ad formats, LinkedIn, in so many different views inside of campaign manager, they will tell you that you have a click through rate that is like 55% or higher. But when you really look at it, you'll realize, oh, every time that LinkedIn sees the word click there saying an open of that message was a click, I mean, we have to change our definitions, we have to pull that data out and recalculate our own click through rate of the like sponsored message, or message ad clicks, divided by the number of opens, just punctuating your point, we really do need to know the definitions super valuable. Alright, so last question for you. What advice would you have to give to a marketer who wanted to get better at troubleshooting and testing? Parker Williams 30:49 Yeah, I think I've kind of mentioned it already. But just being super clear on your hurdles, and your levers you can pull when it comes to the ad campaign you're running. Whether it's on LinkedIn, Google, Facebook, or even your landing page, just being clear on those hurdles. And those levers is a game changer to me. And I feel like, you can go deep with those levers, too. So it's messaging is broad. Right? Like just saying, hey, are levers in messaging Well, what does that mean? Like? It's the ad copy. But like, what do you change in the ad copy? Sometimes there's only so much you can change about an E-book, like at least being clear that, hey, the messaging is what we need to fix. But like, what are the things you could pull off of your tool bag when it comes to messaging? Like, what different types of ad copy like what kind of emotions? Should we use fear? Should we use novelty? Should we use...? What types of influence should we use this messaging to hopefully try and improve click through rate? Should we talk to more of their pain points, or the benefits of the the E book? So when we say lever messaging, like, we actually mean a little bit more than just messaging. AJ Wilcox 32:04 Yeah, I totally agree with that, I find that in troubleshooting, we're oftentimes looking for the largest pain point. So if we take a look at an ad, and we go, the imagery isn't great, but it sure looks like the ad copy is, is really terrible. Let's take a swipe at that, we may not have to redesign the image yet, we're going to do something with the message. And let's say we fix that and click through rate doubles, we might come back and see an image and say, oh, let's make a change here and maybe we can improve another 10%. And then we'll find another, like optimization we can make, and maybe we can get an additional 5% performance. And so we're alleviating the biggest pain that we see from an ad and then making marginally better decisions about how to optimize it. So at first, you'll make big, big pieces of difference. And then later on down the road, you'll find that every change you makes a smaller difference. That's okay. That is the process of optimization. Parker Williams 33:06 Yeah. And one thing to add to the question you asked about, you know, what do you need to do to be successful at troubleshooting and outside of identifying hurdles and levers, being able to prioritize those hurdles, and then prioritize those levers is very crucial, because to your point, let's say the click through rate is poor. And that's the hurdle you're first focusing on. And you pull the offer lever before you even touch messaging, you just wasted a lot of time and potential resources, like just changing the author may not change the performance of the ad, like it could. The messaging, which is yes, it has a big impact. But it's a quick, like, advertising is all about being fast. And failing fast. I never understood that before, when people would say that, but I do now, with understanding troubleshooting, like, if you fell fast to advertising, you're going to be really good at it. And being able to prioritize where you need to fail next, basically is, is kind of the key. AJ Wilcox 34:09 And every failure teaches us something. That's why we call it testing and not necessarily failing. Yeah, even if something is an absolute failure, it still taught us something that we never want to do, again, in the future, in that campaign or with that messaging. And that's valuable. The longer we do it, and the more tests we run, then the better marketers we're gonna get, it breaks my heart when companies are making these super dramatic changes to ads, and they don't have a set AB testing strategy, because you can move things around and get better performance, but you didn't learn anything along the way. And you paid for those learnings, you might as well claim them. Parker Williams 34:48 Yeah, you just brought up a great point to AJ. In advertising there are variables everywhere. Advertising, marketing, sales, there are variables everywhere and if you want to be good troubleshooting and solving problems, solving hurdles that you deal with along that sales funnel, limiting your variables is huge. I can't tell you how many times when it comes to consulting or helping a new account that we're taking over or looking at. They're running like five different ads, there's different images, there's different intros, there's different headlines, that data is useless. Because we don't know what actually influenced that specific ad or that campaign. But if we had all the same images, all the same headlines, and a difference was the intro. We'd be able to say, with confidence that the intro is what's impacting that and we would know where our hurdle really is. Maybe it's not the image maybe it's not the headline. Right now we're focusing on the intro, and that's what we're trying to improve. So limiting your variables with the data's is also another key ingredient. AJ Wilcox 36:00 So true, it makes the test. Well, Parker, thanks so much for coming on, and teaching us an ultra valuable principle. And being an in full transparency one that I didn't know I wanted to cover in a podcast episode. And Parker came to me and said, hey, there's this really important principle, I think it'd be good to have an episode on so Parker, thanks so much for driving that, I really think there's been a ton of value here. Anything else you'd leave the guests with, Parker Williams 36:24 I'll just have fun. doing marketing, have fun. troubleshooting. won't matter if you're not having fun, at the end of the day. If you don't enjoy marketing, like go somewhere else. This is what I've learned as a marketer, as sales. Like, if you're not having fun doing it, then you're probably not in the right place. AJ Wilcox 36:42 I agree. If you're not excited about learning, the results of the last test that you ran, and you're eager to start another one, you can still do your job, but you're not going to be fueled by what else can I learn? What else can I do? And it's my firm belief that marketers who approach it, like you said that they are excited they want to learn and to approach it as a scientist and not necessarily as an artist. I think your career is going to be much greener. Awesome. Well, Parker, thanks so much for joining us. Just for everyone here, I have a couple slides that I share. One is specifically like helping you visualize where the hurdles are. And then another slide that's all about benchmarks. So make sure if that's interesting to you, go check those out. I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around. Speaker 4 37:36 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. AJ Wilcox 37:47 As promised, here are the episodes resources. We made mention of the benchmarking episode so go back and listen to that. That's Episode 15. Plus, you'll find the link down below. I also included the slides, the benchmark slides, and the hurdles slide that we made reference to during the episode. So check the link out for that. These are slides for my actual presentations that I give. These are advanced LinkedIn tactics slides. So definitely check them out if that was interesting to you. And if you are just learning LinkedIn Ads, or you have a colleague or a friend who's looking to learn, definitely check out the course that I did with LinkedIn Learning, you'll see the link for it down below in the show notes. But this is everything that you'll need in order to become a solid starting advertiser. And because it's on LinkedIn Learning, it's so so cheap, so definitely check that out. Also, whatever podcast player you're listening on right now, look down and hit that subscribe button, of course, only if you want to have more of me in your ears. But yeah, hit it. And please do rate and review the podcast. It helps other LinkedIn Ads professionals to find out about the show. And you'd be doing me the biggest favor you can do. With any feedback for the show, hit us up at podcast@B2Linked.com. Let us know any feedback you have for the show or topics you'd love for us to cover. I love to hear from our listeners. All right, with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiative.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Article on LinkedIn Audience Network Measurement Error LinkedIn Ads Support Group NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.   Show Transcript Matched audiences aren't new in social advertising. But LinkedIn gave us something special that no other platform has. What is it you ask? Listen, find out. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! So Facebook blew us all away by offering custom audiences back in 2013. That allowed us to upload lists of individuals for targeting of ads. It also included website retargeting through the facebook pixel, which was very cool indeed. Then Google Ads released customer match in 2015, it was a lot more limited, but still pretty cool. Ever late to the game, LinkedIn released matched audiences in 2017, with very little fanfare, but this was the most epic release to date. Not only could we upload individuals, which was a total game changer, and we can of course do website retargeting. But we got a feature that no other platform can match, account matching, or company name, uploads, whatever you want to call it. Today, we're going to discuss why this is the most important feature you'll ever use on LinkedIn Ads. This month, I listened to a podcast by a woman named Lisanne Murphy. And it's called The Marketing Matrix podcast. It's really good. If you're into Facebook ads, it inspired me to do my episodes a little bit less like a Wikipedia article where I just toss everything out there that you could ever imagine about a topic and make it so you have to take tons and tons of notes, and instead focus more on individual features that you can walk away and focus on much smaller facets of the LinkedIn Ads platform. So I would love your feedback as you listen to the next few episodes. If this is a little bit easier to listen to a little bit less Wikipediaish. Or if you still found yourself scrambling for a pen. Lee Gannon, who's a friend of mine and a friend of the show, he found out something that was pointed out to him by LinkedIn support, he was asking about skills targeting and when he found the documentation that the support was referring to, it said something about how skills targeting is done. It reads, "skills include those explicitly added by members in their skill section, as well as keywords and phrases mentioned throughout their profile and summary." Okay, just capitalizing on what this means. This means not only are we targeting people with the skills listed in their skill section that they themselves added, but LinkedIn is also apparently looking for keywords and key phrases throughout the profile. I'm imagining in your about section, or maybe even in your headline or title. It goes on to say, "LinkedIn uses modeling to infer skills from a members job title and job description." Alright, this was a big shocker to me. And actually, one that I don't know is actually out there in the wild. I have a feeling that this is actually not something that has been rolled out yet, but probably will in the future. And the reason I say this is because when we have leads come in to one of our clients accounts that are of poor quality, we asked the client to bring us a link to the the client's profile, and we go figure out which campaign was targeting them, and what sort of targeting we were using. And every once in a while we will find skills targeting that brings in someone who was of lower quality, but we haven't yet experienced where when we look for the skill that we were targeting and we look down into their skills that that particular skill is not there. So that leads me to believe that this either happens very, very rarely, or it's just not happening yet. I would absolutely love it. If any of you listening, if you have any evidence of this happening, maybe a skills campaign was targeting someone that you cannot find that skill in their profile, please, please please reach out and let me know that would be really great to know. And then Rishabh Rastogi from India, he put in the LinkedIn Ads support group, which is a LinkedIn group. If you're not already a member of it, I highly recommend it. I'll link to that in the show notes. He pointed out an ad format that looks like a text ad, but it was actually in his newsfeed. And he provided a screenshot of it. It was in the newsfeed right in between two posts. And it was actually right above a promoted post, a sponsored content. And because we know sponsored content only goes at max one out of every five slots in the newsfeed and this was right above it. We know this wasn't sponsored content. So he reached out about it. And this one in particular, the headline says LinkedIn ads drive business results reach buyers with the power to act. And then it does have an image and it's around image and the call to action says Create Ad so this is obviously one that LinkedIn is using for themselves to market their own LinkedIn Marketing Solutions products. This was pretty interesting. And I would absolutely love it if we got this kind of an ad format in the future, because I don't know about you, but text ads are one of my favorite ad formats on LinkedIn. They're inexpensive, they're really good for branding, they do such a good job of propping up all the other ad formats that I'm running at the time. And the only problem is that because they're way over in the right rail, and they're on desktop only, so most users aren't seeing them that they get clicked on very, very little. So if I could have a text ad that was in the newsfeed, I think that would probably be really, really powerful. And then Tamas Banki from Budapest, he shot me a private message. He saw this new ad format and wondered what it was. So what it is, it's a sponsored content post that says it's from LinkedIn. And it does say promoted. And then it asks, How familiar are you with and then lists the company name. And then there's some, it's like a poll, like a sponsored poll where they can click very familiar, somewhat familiar, I've only heard the name, and not at all familiar. And he hadn't seen this anywhere. So he was wondering, is there any way that this is a new ad format. And the truth is, this is an ad format that everyone can get access to, if you're spending at least $90,000 per quarter. And maybe you've even seen it inside of campaign manager, there's a new heading right at the top there. It's right in between campaign performance and website demographics. And it's called testing. When you click it, it will come up with the ability to create a test. Now we've been able to run these tests if you are spending high budget and had a LinkedIn Rep for quite a while. But this is now right on the front end where anyone can run these. The way it works is if you're spending at least $90,000 per quarter, as you spend, LinkedIn is going to ask people questions about your brand. There are six different studies that you can run and if you want to run all six of them, you just have to make sure that you have a minimum budget of $270k for the 90 day period. So immediately the small spenders are out. But you large spenders, this is actually really fun to run. The first is a brand lift test. And then there's also an aided awareness test, a brand familiarity test, a brand favorability test, a brand recommendation test, and product consideration test. And what it does is as you are advertising at obviously high volumes, it's asking people how familiar they are with your brand. And by doing that, you'll get data back about how effective your ads are from a branding perspective. It's really cool. Next, just this week, LinkedIn started notifying their customers who were using the LinkedIn audience network. There was a measurement issue we had to do quite a bit of digging for because if you go to the Adweek article that LinkedIn published, there is like zero information about what actually happened. It just says that this mis measurement applied to roughly 8% of LinkedIn Marketing Solutions customers, and for 66% of them, the impact was less than $25. So of course, LinkedIn is crediting that back, some of our clients were getting refunds in the $1,000s of dollars, which obviously made us really curious about what caused this. So in doing a little bit of digging, a source at LinkedIn responded that the effective timeframe is a little over two years, with a heavier impact occurring during the two months leading up to the discovery of the issue. If you want to calculate the impact, basically, you look at the total number of LinkedIn audience network clicks, and basically discount 1.21% of them for any date that was from June of 2021 to before that. This is the average impact that could be on some smaller campaigns. They said this is the average impact so some accounts could see a much smaller effect, and some could be higher. And the effect was higher here in May and June. It seems like every time an ad platform comes out and admits that they had some kind of a mistake, and they go to credit their advertisers, which I think is really awesome because they could just as easily just not tell anyone and let it go. But they do they more or less fess up to it. They give people refunds, which I think is super honorable, but then some jerk or some set of jerks. always end up suing them over it. So please, please, please do not join a class action lawsuit against LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. I would reserve those kinds of actions for companies who do terrible things to you and then don't admit it and you have to find it out yourself. Okay, that's it for the news. Then we've got a couple of reviews that came in one by the user wixfi. It says, "The authority and LinkedIn ads. AJ is a great voice on running LinkedIn campaigns and doesn't hold back. He gives strategic and tactical tips on how you run the ROI positive campaigns for your business." Wixfi, thank you so much for saying that. I really do try to not hold back and just share everything I know. And of course, our goal is always ROI. And then Betsy Hyndman, from Nashville wrote, "AJ is the real deal. Great podcast, super guy, very knowledgeable. I've learned a ton from AJ generously sharing his deep expertise." Betsy, I'm glad to call you a friend. Thanks so much for leaving such a kind review. All right for you right now who are listening. Yes, you! You're listening, you haven't left a review, please go do it. Honestly, it helps the show a lot. It's going to get more people to listen to the show. And plus, I get to shout you out and tell people how awesome you are for saying such awesome stuff about us. So here we go. But honestly, please go do leave a review, I would love to feature you. Okay, with that being said, let's hit it. We're getting right into the meat of the show today. So we're talking about matched audiences. And my favorite part about matched audiences are the list uploads. And so there are two different kinds of list uploads you can do one is a contact list, which you think of as maybe email matching, but I'll tell you why that's not, it's a little bit of a misnomer. And the next one is the company name list upload or the account list. Sometimes you'll hear it referred to as the ABM account targeting list. It's important to understand that with all of these list uploads, there are three things that you can do with it. You can either include that list in your targeting, just targeting those who are on your list. You can exclude those from your targeting. And then you can also use that to create a look alike audience. As long as you're listening to this since 2019, you've been able to do that. So let's touch on the the individuals the contact list upload, there are so many different uses that you can have for uploading a list of individuals. You can use this to target individuals who've joined your email list, that's pretty cool. You can use it to exclude your current customers from seeing your ads. How awesome is that, that you can avoid showing ads to someone and having them pay or you know, charge you, to click on your ads when they're already a customer. So lots of different uses. Now, it's a little known fact that you don't actually need an email address for targeting here, more info on that later. Then you've got the company name list upload. And this is, like I said in the intro, my favorite part of LinkedIn Ads in general. What this allows us to do is upload lists of accounts for inclusion or for exclusion. So inclusion would be like if I had a list of companies on my account based marketing list, and I wanted to fire out some ground cover across those audiences so that when they see our next ads, they're much more likely to interact. They're one of our target accounts, we want them. You can also do the same thing of uploading a list of let's say, your competitors, the competitors by company name, and then you could exclude that list from all of your campaigns. And now all of a sudden, your competitors have no idea what you're advertising, you're flying completely under the radar. That's pretty cool. You can also exclude your current customer list, the companies they work at, or how about you could include a list of all of the companies who've become a lead for your organization, but haven't yet closed. So this becomes kind of a lead acceleration or a sales acceleration type of campaign. Alright, so why is this feature so sexy? Why is it my favorite part of LinkedIn Ads? Well, here's the reason. This is the one feature that no other platform can touch. Facebook, they allowed us to target for a long time people's organizations and their job titles, but guess what, so few people on Facebook ended up putting their professional information in. Facebook is just not the place where you have that kind of data. And so even if Facebook released the ability to target by company in bulk, it would just give you access to such a small percent of the population, it just wouldn't even be worth it. But hey, everyone on LinkedIn tends to list the company they work for. That's kind of the point. Add that to the fact that when you're doing account based marketing targeting, you're targeting a much smaller population. And what that means is, it's not going to allow you to spend as much money. This is a downside for the larger advertisers. But for the smaller advertisers, this is something really powerful you can do and it doesn't take much budget budget. I firmly believe that every B2B company on the planet should be doing this, targeting their absolutely ideal accounts that they want to go after. And it doesn't cost very much, just a few bucks here and there to reach your absolutely ideal audience so they know who you are. That's pretty awesome. Also in the LinkedIn Ads support group on LinkedIn, Jennifer Karos asked this question. She said, "Hey, guys quick question, we uploaded a list with roughly 12,000 contacts. The system recognized about 6,000 of them, but it says it matched 85%. Do you know how this inconsistency could be?" And then Joanna from LinkedIn came in and said, "Hi, Jennifer. I'm Joanna. from our Product Marketing Team at LinkedIn, we see this when we find a match to multiple inputs. For example, if a personal and business email was provided, and we found a single member match to both records, you would see a higher match rate versus the member count." So to put that into perspective, if you upload a list with let's say, first name, last name, company, and title, if it found a match with the company name, and the title on, let's say, half of everyone, it could still say 100% match, but you'd only end up with half of the contacts in your list being represented in your targeting. This was absolutely news to me. So thank you, Joanna, for explaining this to us. We'll come back to this for sure. The next is, it's really important to understand when you upload a list of any kind, it goes through a processing stage. If you've uploaded one of these, you'll see the words "your audience is currently building and may take up to 48 hours or on rare occasion longer to start delivery". One thing I really like about this is you can attach an audience to a campaign even before it's finished building. And what's going to happen is as soon as it's done building, it will immediately start serving the ads. So you don't have to be watching for the status to change, and then go and launch your own ads. Okay, so LinkedIn says right there in their documentation, "It may take up to 48 hours, or on rare occasion longer for a list of process." I call bs on this, I have never ever seen a list to finish processing in under 48 hours. Most of the time it goes to 72 hours and beyond. There's obviously not much I can do. But that's pretty disappointing. I would love to see LinkedIn do something about that. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break. And then we'll dive into some research about what I found that gets lists to match at a higher rate. The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $140 million dollars on LinkedIn Ads, and no one outperforms us on getting you the lowest cost per lead at the most scale. We're official LinkedIn partners, and you'll only deal with LinkedIn Ads experts from day one, Fill out the contact form on any page of B2linked.com to chat about your campaigns. We'd absolutely love to work with you. All right, let's jump into it. So I've been doing audience research now for years. And what I share with you this certainly isn't like a benchmark data by any means, but they should help you understand a little bit about how the matching algorithm works. So a couple years ago, when LinkedIn stopped including email addresses in our connections export, I exported all of my connections on LinkedIn without their email address, and then uploaded it to LinkedIn. This was so interesting, because it reported a 90 plus percent match rate, but then the resulting audience that it gave me was only a quarter of the size of my network. So that means there were a lot of those records matching on other things, but a whole bunch that matched on none, at least from what Joanna from LinkedIn shared. So then what I did is I uploaded a list of all of my followers, and this was just their first and last names. And I just wanted to see what it did. It matched it only 50%. But it did return about half the number of my followers. Because first and last names really aren't all that unique. I would not be surprised at all, if some of these were matching people who had the same name as my followers, but weren't actually the followers. I didn't actually advertise this audience. That would be, I don't know, I'm not very confident in that one. And then me and my team found out that you can get a much higher match rate by including in addition to first and last name, also job title and company name. By doing this, we ended up finding that we got a 90% plus match rate, which is awesome. And then just last week for fun, I uploaded my followers list again, my most updated one,, and I wanted to test two things. I included in both of them first name, last name, and company. But for the job title field, I wanted to see if LinkedIn pulled more from their actual job title in the experience section or if it was their headline. My hypothesis was actually that LinkedIn was going to pull more from their headline because more people use their headline I feel like, but boy was I wrong. When I use the headline as the job title, LinkedIn reported that it matched 85%. But it only matched just a little over 61% of the contacts that I uploaded. Okay, that's interesting 61%. Then I uploaded that same list, but with the job title field as the job title. LinkedIn reported this as matching at 90%, but it actually matched 75%. So that's 14 more percent of a match, just by using the job title field instead of the headline. That was really interesting to me. So the takeaway is here, the now what, when you go and upload individual lists, make sure you include first name, last name, job title, their actual job title would help, and their company name, that's going to help you get a much, much higher match rate. One thing you'll notice if you go in and export a list of connections from LinkedIn, if LinkedIn sees an @ in any other field, except for the email address field, it's going to fire off an error. So for instance, if someone has the @ in their headline, because they're saying, I'm the VP at this company, you're gonna have to get rid of that before the list will even validate to process. The way I do that is right inside of Excel, I just do a search and replace on every column except for email address, where I search for the app sign and replace it with nothing. Okay, I know the LinkedIn products team listens to the show. So I'm going to give you and everyone else here, my wish list for how LinkedIn can make their matched audiences product even better. The first is, like I mentioned before, faster processing. It really shouldn't take 72 hours to process lines of text, I would expect it to take that long, if there was a human in the background, like manually doing things in Excel before the list could be processed. That would make a lot more sense. If the list has 300,000 rows, which is the maximum, I could understand it going longer. But like I said, I've literally never seen any list finished processing under 72 hours. And most of the lists that we upload are in the 10,000 to 30,000 rows range so we're not maxing it out by any means. Something else I would absolutely love in the contact list. I want to be able to target by LinkedIn URL. Forget matching by first name, last name, company name, email, job title, if you have the LinkedIn URL for the person that you're going after, even better, I would much rather use that, it would match it 100%. Please LinkedIn give us that. Then back in 2017, when we got the matched audiences feature, I asked why LinkedIn just shows 90% or higher as a match rate for company names. Why can't they show us the actual if it's really 100%. And LinkedIn replied that it was because they were worried about privacy. Now I get it being a privacy issue, if you are showing an exact match for individuals for a contact list. But there is absolutely no privacy issue with company names and targeting. A company name is public. I just think that's totally a non issue here. So I would absolutely love it. If we got a real match rate for company match. Show us the exact percentage matched. Now recently, if you go into your your list uploads, there will be a tab for companies matched and companies not matched. And that's really cool. If I targeted let's say I was targeting IBM, and I typed in just the letters IBM, but LinkedIn was only going to match it if it was i dot b dot m dot, then if you go into that list, it will tell you that IBM did not match on your list. And that's pretty cool, you can fix it, but I just don't see why the general percentage match shouldn't reflect the exact match for company. And finally here, we've talked about this a little bit, but the match rate really should be based on the number of matches that occurred out of the total number of rows uploaded, I definitely shouldn't have LinkedIn reporting to me 85% match rate to do my own calculation and find out it's actually 61%. That one definitely seems like a product that was built by engineers, not advertisers, I would love to see that one fixed, or heck give us both metrics. Maybe one shows the number of rows that resulted in a match and another one that shows the strength of each match. That could be cool, but I'd want to see both. I don't want to just have the strength of the match shown to me instead of the raw number. Alright, I've got the episode resources coming right up for you. So stick around 25:01 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. All right, first of all, there's that article that LinkedIn published about the LinkedIn Audience Network, and its measurement glitch. So I'll link to that it's on Adweek.com. Just be prepared, the article says absolutely nothing, but you're welcome to take a look at it. Also, if you're trying to learn LinkedIn Ads better or have a colleague or a coworker who is make sure to point them towards the LinkedIn Learning course that I'm the the author of. It just got a refresh early this year and we added about 25 extra minutes of content plus updating everything. It's really good. If I don't say so myself. If this is your first time listening to the show, thanks for tuning in. please do hit that subscribe button on whatever podcast player you're listening with. Please do rate the podcast and like I said before, it really helps the show if you review. That's exactly how you can repay me for dropping all this knowledge, those are knowledge bombs. Okay, so if you want to reach out to us, give us any ideas or any feedback for the show hit us up at podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. I sure hope. We're working on more consistency here. I'm cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Video Example of Green Headlines, reported by Mark Gustafson Georgiana Dumitru's Case Study NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.   Show Transcript You love LinkedIn Ads hacks, I love LinkedIn Ads hacks. Heck, everyone loves LinkedIn Ads hacks. Buckle up. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. So I posted out on LinkedIn asking for other advanced advertisers' favorite LinkedIn Ads hacks or strategies. And there were some really good ones. The post had over 20,000 views, and 149 comments last I checked. So for this episode, I'm going to be sharing the community's top strategies. And don't worry, I removed all the bad advice before recording the episode. In the news, we got something really cool that I've been excited about for a long time, we can now rename the default campaign group in an account. And we can pause it. So no promises here, it's rolled out to all of my accounts. But I did talk to a couple people who haven't seen it yet. So it may not be fully rolled out. This is so great because before this happened, we had this entity in there called default campaign group that we couldn't do anything with. It sat there and if we decided not to use it, it still took up space. So now we can pause it, we can rename it, and life is good. I also had a good friend reach out Mark Gustafson, who's the CEO of 900Kings, an agency that focuses just on paid social. You may remember I consulted with him for the Google Ads and the Facebook Ads episodes early on. He brought a really cool feature to my attention, he sent me a video of it, I'll link the video down below. And what we can see is on mobile, as you scroll down past an ad, the headline itself turns from the cream color that it starts out as to a light green. And this is really cool because it's going to bring more attention to ads. And it's not something that I would call very in your face, or gross or anything like that. I think this is a really good change. So it has rolled out to Mark's profile, but I don't have it yet. So I'm going to keep watching. And this could just be a test. Who knows LinkedIn might not be rolling this out forever. But boy, I liked it. And I hope it does roll out, I'd be really interested to see what sort of a difference it makes. I also want to apologize to all of you loyal listeners of the show for having so few episodes this year. In full transparency. I just went through a divorce, and it reduced me to a crumpled pile of human for more months than I'd like to admit. The good news is though, I'm back on the upswing, and I want to thank all of you sincerely who reached out to check on and see if everything was okay. I do have a whole slew of episode topics already planned. And my intent is to go back to getting out a weekly episode. So if I don't hit it here, in just the next few episodes, just know that that's the plan moving forward. That's what I want to start getting back to. There are a couple reviews I'd like to highlight. The first is from Phil Ilic, who's from Great Britain. He said, "This podcast is so valuable. There's so much wisdom in every single episode. Literally I cannot thank AJ enough for everything he has shared so generously with the LinkedIn Ads community. It has been a massive help." And Phil, thank you. I've enjoyed seeing your comments on the posts I put out and interaction with the podcast episodes. So thank you, that means the world to me. The next is from Steve SeeBerg here from the US. His review says, "Conversions through the roof. Based on AJ's insightful advice and his talented staffs AB testing suggestions. We've experienced conversion rates four to five times LinkedIn's benchmark. If you're interviewing LinkedIn Ad agencies, stop, I've tried a few and none can match B2Linked, actionable insights and bottom line results. AJ, you're the best." Steve, thank you so much for that unsolicited review. I'm so grateful for it. Awesome getting to work with you and your team. And I'm excited to get to keep working together to keep killing. Steve runs a mar tech company called NGAGGE and I'm going to spell it, it's n g a g g e, definitely check that out. It's a cool product and one that he's going to be keeping free to us marketers forever. If you're listening to this and you've gotten value out of the podcast, please please, please leave a review on whichever podcast player or portal that you use. I would love to feature you here. Okay, with that being said, in no particular order. Here is the community's favorite hacks and strategies. Let's hit it. Blake Prichard is a customer success manager at Through. And he said I'm not into marketing at the moment. But when I managed LinkedIn Ads, my favorite targeting method was building an audience by specific skills. You can get very targeted. For example, if you want to promote a webinar to people who are skilled in a specific web app, you can do that with the skills audience. And of course, you can select the level of seniority and experience level on top of that. Blake, I love what you shared. Because we found the same thing. A lot of times someone will have experience with a certain type of software or a certain area of business, that it's not important enough to make it to their their job title proper, but it is worth them adding to their skills. And in fact, on top of this, we found lots of times they'll go and join groups around that topic as well. So targeting people by both skill and group is awesome. Kristine Sergejeva, who is a friend and super loyal listener of the show, she runs SmartB2B. She said, my favorite LinkedIn Ads hack is to do the proper homework, the initial assessment, for each company. We find out if it's suitable for LinkedIn Ads, and what the unique opportunity is on LinkedIn among its competitors. Does the company have proper offers, and if not, which offers should they create, what can be done with possible target segments, etc. And for every offer, what types of campaigns would work best to which segments and which ads. I invest most of my time and efforts in the initial assessment phase, and then the implementation is very clear, easy, and bringing excellent results. I really like this because when you're spending money on LinkedIn Ads, it's inherently high risk because the costs are higher than other ad channels. So any research you can do ahead of time to find out what's going to be good, accepted by this audience, what's going to excite them, it's all going to be very useful. And then Yoel Israel, who's another LinkedIn Ads fanatic, he's based out of Israel, probably here in the next, I'd say six months, we're gonna have an episode where we interview him, he shared an account based marketing strategy. He said, account based targeting of accounts sales is trying to close. We make blogs that address the objections in the sales process, and we don't gate them. Click through rates are super high and this really helps the sales team close those super low funnel deals. We then sync this ABM list with HubSpot to make sure it's always up to date. I love account based marketing. Yoel, thanks so much for sharing such a cool tip. Colton Taylor, who's actually in my same state, he's here in Utah. He's the Sr. Demand / Digital Marketing Manager at MX. He said targeting is everything. Audience segmentation and sophisticated build out takes time. But the foundation for effective hyper growth scaling, for example, 200%, year over year budget increase, but is the foundation for effective hyper growth scaling. He follows this up by saying, "And always keep learning. The beauty of marketing is that it's ever evolving. And mastery is a journey." On the sophisticated account build out. I love this because when we build a really complex build out, we're essentially building a ton of small AB tests between audiences. And once we've been running ads for a while, we can then look back at all of those different segments. And it's going to teach us something. It's going to teach us which audience segments are going to be successful and which ones aren't. Who likes what, who responds to what? So Colton, absolutely, I love that comment. And then the bit about always keeping learning. That's my favorite part about digital marketing in general, is we can't ever sit back and rest on our laurels because it's always going to be changing. And those who try to sit back and not learn. They get found out pretty quick. Always keep testing. Always keep learning. Next is Lucy Kikuchi. She's a podcast host as well. And her advice was, "Listen to AJ Wilcox. That is my go to strategy. Assume nothing. Test everything. Test, optimize, test, optimize and give things time. Nothing happens overnight. There are no quick wins, and no one owes you that." Lucy, I laughed when I read that. Thanks for recommending people listen to this podcast, obviously. But I definitely agree with you. We need to approach LinkedIn Ads, like everything as a test. I know a lot about the platform, I have a lot of experience with it. And even still, I have tests that absolutely fail. If you approach it scientifically, it's going to be a lot better in the long run than just assuming that you can turn something on and it should be successful from day one. And sorry for slaughtering this name, but Vojtech Toulec from CDN77. His recommendation is, "Use Sales Navigator or recruiter to find the real profiles matching the ad targeting criteria and then optimize the targeting to cut off the non relevant audiences." I love this go and find examples of who the people are who your targeting would hit. You can do this with Sales Navigator. If you see profiles coming up that you're not happy with, you wouldn't want them to be in your target audience. You can then use exclusions. I love it. Cody Lee, who's a VP and growth marketing and digital advisor, he said, "Favorite quick one, call out your target audience in your copy, just like he did so well in this post." When I put out the post, I said, attention LinkedIn advertisers, I've definitely tested ads that do call out the audience to get their attention, and they really can be some quick wins. He also gave four other recommendations here and I'm going to run through all four of them because all four of them were great. He said, focus on adding value to your target audience with qualified content. Frame it more like news or a resource than an ad. Number two bidding, adjust your manual bid up or down depending on your click through rate. Better click through rate than benchmark, lower your bid. Targeting, upload target account lists. Make sure to use exclusions to not waste spend. And the fourth funnel, have a strategy throughout your prospects awareness journey from unaware to problem aware to solution aware to brand aware into pipeline. Remarket LinkedIn audiences on less expensive channels." Thanks, Cody. All good all the way through. Next, Maninder Paul, who again, is a great listener of the show, super active on LinkedIn. She's a paid social specialist at Bloom Mentor. She said, "Always test a single image ad. Keep creative, simple." I love this because we find so much of the time when we try to get complex, it slows us down and makes it so we can't test as much. So if you approach it with the very simplest test possible, you can at least get something out and start running data and find out what's going to work. She also recommends using a perspective company list, an ABM list, she said it's been successful for her clients, I will back that up. Zoltán Kozma, who if you remember right from Episode 44, he was actually one of the winners of the perfect ad performance contest. He's a digital marketer at CBRE Hungary. He said, "It's hard to choose, I love to use daily spend data to make sure I don't pay too much, while also staying competitive in the auction." What he's talking about is, if you look at your budget column, LinkedIn will show you a percentage of over the last however many days they calculate how much of the budget you've spent on a daily basis. So he likes to have that at least 80% of your daily budget. And this makes a lot of sense. If you go significantly under that, you've got to bid higher to spend more with that audience. And if you go too much above that, you're at risk of basically bidding too much and blowing your budget for the day on those days when you actually do spend the whole budget. He also says, "For further fine tuning. I like applying the learnings from the campaign demographics to find the best engaging audiences, these often helped to push cost per lead down." And then he adds, "Another great one is the engagement objective hack to trick the algorithm that I learned from you, AJ". And this one, if you've caught it before, what we find is because the floor price for engagement objective ads, because it's 35% cheaper, you can find when you're running ads, where less than 35% of the interactions come from social, then you can switch from website visits to the engagement objective and essentially save some cash. Here's a quick sponsor break. The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. 13:38 If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you, B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $140 million on LinkedIn Ads, and no one outperforms us on getting you the lowest cost per lead and the best scale. We're official LinkedIn partners, and you'll deal only with LinkedIn Ads experts from day one. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to chat about your campaigns. We'd love to help explore with you and work with you. Ben Evans, who's the President at Auditec Solutions, he said, "Hi, AJ, this is more of a relationship building strategy. But what I find when I first make a new connection with a new contact, I send them a personalized video message through the mobile app introducing myself." I know this isn't specifically ads related. But Ben, you're absolutely right. The more something feels personal to us, like someone went out of their way to make us feel special. The more indebted we're going to feel to them. Whether you're doing organic or ads. This is a great way to help make that relationship strong. And then Vishnu Prashanth, he's a performance marketer. He says, "Spy on the job listings posted by your target account lists and find out the right job title that matches with your products pain point and use them in targeting." Yeah, if they're trying to hire for it, chances are there is a pain point that they're looking to solve. That's pretty cool. And David Planchot, Growth Marketing atiAdvize, he said, "Using smart links on your LinkedIn ads." For those of you who don't know what smart links are, when you're using Sales Navigator, the upgraded license on LinkedIn, which I just barely started using the other day,it's fun. You can create one link that has a whole bunch of different calls to action or different resources there. And then when someone downloads or accesses something, you get the data from them opting in. And it's a cool way to have conversion tracking without nearly as much friction as you'd have in specifically having them fill out a form. He even included a really cool screenshot of a workflow, where he shows how he automates the smart links and gets them into HubSpot. Pretty dang cool. Georgiana Dumitru. She's in B2B demand generation. And she said, "As I see it with LinkedIn ads, it's crucial to first win the view, the attention, and then worry about the click. The battle on the feet is fierce, and we must get noticed first, so I put all my money on crafting highly effective ads, making the best ad copy and image. At some point I started to use the journalistic approach. Have my ad copy answer the what, where, when, and why questions that make the ad sound like news rather than a salesy message. And it worked." She even links to a case study she created about writing better ad copy. And Michael Bennington, who's a marketing specialist at Edelstein & Company, he says, "Creating a bid by click that is the minimum instead of what they recommend. Learned it from you during your 2020 inbound presentation." Michael, thanks for pointing that one out. It's amazing to me how many people look at the ranges that LinkedIn recommends for a manual CPC bid and they just take whatever the recommendation is that LinkedIn provides. Those recommendations might be accurate if you're spending six figures a month or more. But for accounts with lower budgets, absolutely, you can start by bidding a heck of a lot less. Raphael Yarish, who's the co founder of AdFind.co which spoiler alert, I think we're probably going to have an episode specifically mentioning this one coming up. But he said, "Here are my three favorite insights. Number one, using user generated content instead of stock images to stand out from the feed and get higher click through rates. Include text on the image or video, a free placement for copy that really pops. And finally, use day parting having specific times when you should run your LinkedIn Ads for optimal performance." Raphael, I think those are totally spot on. The next is Ricardo Ghekiereand I've been on his podcast before. He's the head of paid social at Upthrust. He said, "sking for the LinkedIn URL in your lead gen form, instead of bombarding people with questions, then scrape the API, and then scrape the profiles to get all the information that you would have asked for, then upload into a CRM, and then automate a relevant connection request from your sales department based on the call to action that you provided, and then have a message based follow up." Now, Ricardo, I think this is great. I love the system. I can't recommend scraping LinkedIn because as a partner, I probably wouldn't be in very good standing if I did. But I love the line of thinking here. Lee Gannon, who is the head of paid social at Receptional, he said, "With a primary strategy of lead gen forms, I like running some follow up retargeting based on the form engagement." He also recommends running text ads as a complimentary ad format, alongside the sponsored content, especially for targeting account lists for cheap brand awareness. He said, "Learned that from the master AJ Wilcox". Well, I'm glad you picked it up with what I shared it. I think it's fantastic. Claire Williams who is apaid social strategist, a woman that I've gotten the chance to, to train on LinkedIn Ads. She's amazing. She says, "Manual bidding. Not sure that that's a hack, really, but it's super important." And I totally agree with that. As soon as LinkedIn started making auto bidding, the default I got to watch LinkedIn's average CPC is just climb and climb and climb. It was probably like 30 to 50% increases in costs per click. Just because LinkedIn rolled that out. I'm sure they're patting themselves on the back getting lots and lots more money. But the fact of the matter is for advertisers, the vast majority of them are probably paying way too much for clicks. So I agree. Manual bidding is a great way to go. This one's pretty self serving, but Andrew Tull, who's a great marketer here in the US, he said, "My key resources letting AJ Wilcox guide me, lol. Oh, in the day parting and automation magic provided by B2Linked.com." Thanks, Andrew. I appreciate it. Your checks in the mail. Next, Ryan Gervais is a Demand Generation & Paid Media Strategist at Deloitte. He said, "Strategic usage of account exclusion lists. For example, competitors, vertical based, pipeline, etc." I love using exclusions. Thanks, Ryan. Theresa Sturm is a digital consultant at Via Digital. She says, "Working on badass creative and copy. A good click through rate is key to high quality score." I totally agree Teresa. We tend to bag on marketers who care too much about click through rates. But the fact of the matter is, getting a good click through rate really is key to getting high performance. They have to go hand in hand, Matthew Sciannella, he has a great recommendation here about targeting audiences that don't always fit in neat, firmographic target. So he says, "I try to go and find LinkedIn groups for these niche industries. And I target them as a seed audience. And then I look in LinkedIn's demographic data, to look at their industries, function, job titles, etc." And he also actually looks at some specific members profiles to look at their skills and that gives them more data to create skills targeting. Love it Matthew. Simon L. who's a Director of Marketing at Acodis. He says, "Build your target group, and then focus on frequent contributors as they are much more likely to interact." Ah, I thought this was super cool. If you look in the additional targeting traits, you'll see that there is a way to layer on frequent contributors. If you target them, they are much more likely to be active on LinkedIn. And I would imagine that means that they're going to click at a higher rate. Simon, I'm going to go test that. Alexandra Wittmaier from GBTEC, she said, "Use an optional checkbox in the lead gen form for subscribing to the newsletter. Yeah, if you're going to get people signing up for an asset, you might as well get them into the newsletter as well and have it be compliant." Alright, let's jump into the rest of the recommendations. Kris Selway says, "Running 55 second video ads on cost per view, building up a low cost remarketing list, and targeting all those that viewed the video for at least 25% of the duration with a more commercially focused ad." I love it, Chris, anything we can do with warming up cold audiences and running them through a funnel is awesome by me. Michael Ham says, "Using work email address as a custom field in your lead gen forms rather than just the default email address. So people type their work emails, surprisingly, most people do." Great advice, Michael. We know that in working with a lot of sales teams, they really prefer having a work email address. And of course, it's hard with the lead gen forms because you can't force someone to put in something that isn't like a gmail, but when you specify it, you will get more people doingit. Márcio Miranda gives three different strategies. The first is put UTM parameters on your URL, and then retarget on your other social media networks based off of the parameters in the URL. I think this is awesome. I've been an advocate of that for a long time. The next thing the companies that interact with my ad, and then go on YouTube and play a TrueView ad in that company channel. This is what I haven't experienced, I'm not sure how to get the ad interactions on LinkedIn over onto YouTube to get the TrueView ad to trigger. This is one I haven't fully wrapped my head around. So my understanding here is that Márcio will go and look at the companies who by name who've interacted with the ads, and then go and find their YouTube channel and then play a TrueView ad in that company's channel. It sure sounds interesting. And then finally, on the lead gen form ads put the last URL after the submission with a link to direct scheduling platform like calendly. I think this is super cool. If you're going to push people right after they've converted right to something like a calendly link. Oh, rad. Diana Leyton recommends targeting based on LinkedIn group membership. If you choose the right ones, I generally find it's the best ways to find a captive intent based audience. And then Jordan Lapendry says, "I tried many iterations to test my audience format and content. I've seen that most of the time. The classic works well for acquisition and then video ads have good performance on retargeting." Thanks again so much for everyone who contributed. This was awesome. So much gold in one LinkedIn thread. I just couldn't wait to share it. All right, I've got the episode resources coming up right away. So stick around. Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 24:40 All right, here's some cool resources. Like we mentioned earlier, Mark Gustafson submitted a video showing the green highlights on the LinkedIn Ads headline. So down below in the show notes we've linked to that video so you can see for yourself. And then we also have a link to Georgiana Dumitru's post where she has a case study about LinkedIn ad copy. Don't forget the newly updated LinkedIn Learning course that I have the link down below for that one. I am the author. So I'm a little bit biased. But by far, this is the best LinkedIn Ads course. If you've enjoyed the episode today and you want more insights like this, definitely hit subscribe in whatever podcast player you're listening on right now. Please rate the podcast when you're in there. And please also do leave a review. I shout out everyone here on the podcast. And then if you have any recommendations, any questions, any feedback for the show, please email us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives. ​

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Global State of Sales Report 2021 Sean Callahan LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Certifications   Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Show Transcript:   AJ Wilcox LinkedIn released the state of sales in 2021 report, and I can confirm, it's fire! Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. AJ Wilcox Hey there, LinkedIn Ads fanatics, I have a confession for you. I am a marketer. I'm a marketer through and through. And I don't consider myself a salesperson. In fact, I consider myself to be the furthest thing from a salesperson. But after years of internal debate, and reconciling the image of the sleazy used car salesman with what I do, I finally come to admit to myself that sales performance is deeply and undeniably connected with my LinkedIn Ads efforts, it's absolutely not uncommon for us to be absolutely slaying it for a client and getting incredible costs and results and low cost per lead. But then just to find out that their sales team doesn't know how to handle the leads, they don't close any, and it makes us look bad. Or the other way around. We can be doing decently, but maybe we haven't quite hit our stride with optimizations yet. And then sales happens to close something. And suddenly, we look like rock stars. No matter which way you slice it. We as marketers live and die by the performance of our sales counterparts. Because of this connection. I'm pleased to have Sean Callahan from LinkedIn as our guest this week. I've gotten to collaborate with him on many projects, I'm lucky to call him a friend. And his team has recently released the state of sales report. And I know you're going to find it fascinating, as well as it will help you become a better marketer. First in the news, in May, LinkedIn released several new features. So let's walk through those. The first is boosting posts, basically, like a really simple version of campaign manager for maybe a social marketer who doesn't do much on the paid side to be able to boost their posts to target audiences. I'm not very excited about this, I kind of think, meh, because I would much rather use campaign manager. But maybe you've got folks on your social team, or maybe even organic team that would be interested to know about this. Next, LinkedIn officially released their event ads. And on the roadmap episodes in the past, we've talked several times about event ads and what they're going to be in my testing, I haven't found them to outperform a single image sponsored content ads when promoting an event. But it's definitely worth testing to see if you can get them to help perform. One thing of note in our testing is that you can't have multiple copies of the event for like individual campaign tracking. So it's kind of like boosting posts, you pretty much create one event, and then share it into multiple campaigns. I don't like that for attribution. So I hope we'll have a little bit more control over attribution for event and in the future. The next one I am really excited about this is we're now able to go live on LinkedIn live without a third party app. So I absolutely love using Restream.io. They're my favorite streaming platform. But every single time I go live on LinkedIn, I always have some sort of a technical hurdle. Because I'm trying to run through, you know, three or four different applications, it runs my laptop so hard, that it's just you know, the fan is screaming. And so now we get to do this by broadcasting directly through something like zoom or a WebEx that you might already be using to go live. It simplifies things. And it's going to give me a lot more confidence when going live. And hopefully, you'll be able to see me go live a little bit more often. We also got some beefed up event analytics. So these are more insights into your LinkedIn events, which is something we're super grateful for. We've really wanted this ever since events came out. Every time LinkedIn releases a new feature, we want to you'll have all kinds of insights into whether or not it's working. And now we actually have that for events. In the same release, LinkedIn also released mobile page insights. So if you've ever wanted to see how your LinkedIn page was performing, but you were on the go, you were just pretty much out of luck. Well, now LinkedIn have released the ability to see your page analytics, right from the LinkedIn mobile app. And this is fantastic. I applaud anytime we get more control and insight in the mobile app. Something else really exciting. I've been asked about this for years and years, LinkedIn just released their official certifications. And not only are they free, but if you get certified within the next 30 days. It's probably like the next 20 days after this podcast goes live. But you'll get one of the like bragging rights of being one of the very first people to be certified. So check the notes down below. In the show notes, you'll see a link right to the certifications. There are two that you can take right now and get them attached to your LinkedIn profile to show off that you rock at LinkedIn Ads. And our last piece of news here something I'm really, really excited. In many of the last episodes, I've kind of hinted and teased about this. But as of this week, the official LinkedIn Ads course update is now live. So to give you an idea, I recorded the last LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads. It's been several years now. And the content was about an hour and five minutes long. And I've been collecting feedback and questions, and you know, all kinds of different insights over the last several years. And I've now gotten to put that into the update. So if you've taken the course in the past, I would highly recommend go and take the updated course, I think it's about an hour and 45 minutes long, and it is chockfull. I couldn't be more proud of the information and the learnings that you'll have within the course. So hit the link in the show notes, go to LinkedIn Learning, and take the course you'll be absolutely pleased you did. Popping into recent reviews, first of all, a huge thank you to the one person who rated this podcast with one star and didn't even leave a review. I don't know what I did to piss you off. But feel free to reach out to me to discuss what I could be doing better on the show or how we can better support you. We had a review from Max in Thailand, and he says, "This is Max. I'm an Italian living in Thailand, I just want to drop a note to say thank you for your work, and really appreciate the level of details in your podcast. I'm not a podcast listener, and I stumbled in your channel by chance. But I have found this to be one of the best free radio sources I have ever seen. Congratulations, and thanks again." Max, thank you so much. It means the world to me that someone who's not into podcasts would become a podcast listener because of this show. So thanks so much. And on behalf of the medium of podcasting, I hope you find lots of other valuable stuff here too. We also had David leave a review who said, "I'm an intern, and our founder has assigned to me with finding the absolute best podcast. So I had to reach out to you because the LinkedIn Ads Show podcast is absolutely amazing. Our company is focused on providing the necessary tools and knowledge to our customers to fill their calendars with demos through cold emails and LinkedIn." David, thanks so much for sharing those experiences. First of all, I'm glad that the show showed up in your searches, as you were out trying to find this for the CEO, and boy, glad to have you as a listener. Okay, with that being said, I want to feature you all of you here in the reviews highlight. So make sure you go to whatever podcast player or hub and leave us a review on the podcast. Of course, I would prefer not leaving one star reviews. Especially not saying why. But certainly, please leave a review. Let us know what you think of the show and we'll shout you out. Okay, I'm so excited to have Sean Callahan. Let's jump right to the interview. All right, Sean Callahan. Welcome to the show. Sean is a Senior Content Manager at LinkedIn. He works out of the Chicago office. Personally, he's the author of several children's books, including the most recent Voting with a Porpoise. He helped create LinkedIn's latest state of sales reports. Sean and I go way back. We met at CES several years back. We've gotten to collaborate on a bunch of different projects and things. And now I'm really excited to get to talk to you about this latest report. So welcome to the show. Sean Callahan 8:25 Hey, thanks for having me on. AJ, it's great to connect again. AJ Wilcox 8:29 Always, always fun pleasure for me. So first of all, tell us about the state of sales report. And why you and your team decided to take it on, how long it's been running, all those goodies. Sean Callahan 8:40 Yeah, well, this is a this is a report. This is the fifth time we've done this state of sales report. It's a survey of what's going on in sales. We're trying to talk to our customers for the LinkedIn Sales Navigator product and the LinkedIn Sales Insights product about where sales is headed. We're just trying to be useful to the marketplace. And this report is pretty extensive. So it's global in nature. We interviewed or we surveyed more than 7500 people in 10 countries, the US and Canada, Netherlands, Germany, France, UK, Brazil, Mexico, Singapore, Australia and India. And I think that's actually 11 because we did have the Netherlands this year. And we asked them a huge battery of questions. It's buyers and sellers were asking, so we're getting both sides of the sales process. And we also use LinkedIn data for this. You know, on our platform, we're able to tell through Sales Navigator analyzing actions by salespeople, what actions work and what don't. We find generally that if you share content on a regular basis, but not overly sharing that you do better, same with sending emails, we've got some data on that. And we also interviewed 30 to 40 sales experts and sales leaders for this version of the report, which was something new. So we brought in different perspectives from the industry, not only in the US and Canada, but around the globe, Latin America, EMEA, and APAC and got their points of views and included those in the reports, there's a global version of the report that's coming out in a month, we have already released a US version, UK version, a version for France just came out this week. We have Brazil and Mexico already out and a version of the Netherlands in English out and the other reports will be coming out over the next several weeks. So it's a pretty extensive project. And and again, we're just trying to be useful for the sales industry and and talk about what's happening, I can go into the seven trends that we found here, I'll just list them we'll talk in more detail, I think as we go along in this conversation. But number one was virtual selling is good for sellers and even better for buyers. Number two is sales organizations and managers must adjust to a remote working world and the just now, sales organizations are preventing sellers from putting buyers first I think this is a really interesting one and I can go into detail on that as we dive in a little deeper. We found six sales behaviors in particular that are killing deals. We found that sales technology provides, especially in this virtual selling world, a key pathway to building trust. Number six was for sales organizations, data is more crucial than ever. And number seven was buyers and sellers are ramping up their use of LinkedIn. AJ Wilcox 11:35 Oh, so first of all super interesting trends. I loved reading all of them. What I really like about this report is it really is an amalgamation of so many important things. Of course, there's the survey. So you're getting data from your customers, but then you brought in experts. And my favorite part is you're actually using LinkedIn data. I can't imagine anyone else who has more insights about what sales folks are doing than LinkedIn. And so I'm so glad that you've gotten to bring that to the table. Sean Callahan 12:03 Yeah, I think it makes our report unique, and gives us a view of the sales world that is almost impossible to replicate. AJ Wilcox 12:12 Oh, yeah. So because our listeners are for the vast majority, LinkedIn Ads professionals, mostly in the marketing job function. I'm really curious, what sort of impact do you think this data and these findings will have on us as marketers? And what insights can we take from it? Sean Callahan 12:30 Yeah, well, I think one of the key things is that marketers should just understand that sales is in a period of change right now. And I think that may help as a marketer myself, and working with a bunch of salespeople. I understand, you know, and throughout my career, that marketing and sales don't always work together, as well as they probably should have, or as well as certainly as well as we want them to. But I think understanding that there's a huge shift happening in sales right now, with virtual selling technology coming on, remote work coming into play, I think it's important for marketers to understand that that's number one. Number two, I think there's some interesting stuff in this report about the power of brand for salespeople. And it can give marketers sort of a leg up in explaining to salespeople the power of marketing for them. You know, I think sometimes it's hard for salespeople to appreciate what marketers can do for them. And this helps, because, for instance, in the six behaviors that are immediate deal killers, and this is all data from the US Canada report. One of the top behaviors that is seen as a deal killer by buyers is that the salesperson is affiliated with a brand that I don't trust. So putting money behind branding is something that is going to help salespeople gain the trust of buyers. I think that's an interesting, you know, thing that I think sometimes it's hard for marketers to communicate that and here we have it. In our survey, we also had buyers rank the factors that are important in influencing the purchase of a product or service. And number one was trust in the brand of product or service, like it had nothing to do with the salesperson, you know that number one thing is about the brand of the product or service. And I think that speaks to how marketers can begin to talk to salespeople about what marketing and investment in marketing brings to the table for salespeople and helping to close deals, meet their quota, etc. AJ Wilcox 14:42 Oh, I like it. Okay, so that leads me to another question here. What can we do to strengthen our sales teams with the findings from this report? Is this as simple as like forward it to the sales team and you try to get them to read it? Like do you have any tips for us as marketers to help our sales teams act on this? Sean Callahan 14:59 Yeah. I think talking about brand is important. And I think salespeople understand it in their gut, you know that if they walk into a customer, or if they're emailing a customer, the brand in the.com, you know, is one that they're confident that the customer, the prospect is going to recognize and has as a good feeling about. I think that's very powerful and seeing it come from not a marketer saying this, but buyers saying this, you know, I think that's very valuable from the marketing point of view. It's kind of a recapitulation of the idea that no one ever got fired for buying IBM. Buyers, like the comfort of a brand that they recognize. And marketers can use this to argue for more investment in brand, which ultimately is not helping the marketer, but helping the salesperson and helping the salesperson close deals. AJ Wilcox 15:54 So true. And we find this time after time, anytime that we're running an account based marketing or an ABM campaign, if our clients are doing active outreach from their sales departments to their buyer, we find that as soon as we start advertising, our advertising gets a lot more efficient. And their success rates get a lot more efficient, just because these people now if heard of you, they know who you are, they assume there's some legitimacy to your brand. And so I definitely second that branding is super valuable to what we do. Sean Callahan 16:25 Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I'm partial to the phrase or the slogan that if they don't get into the top of the funnel, you're not going to get them to the bottom of the funnel. AJ Wilcox 16:34 Oh, yeah. So without spoiling the exciting stuff in the report, can you talk about what went in to finding these trends? And maybe a little bit about what may have surprised you? Sean Callahan 16:44 Yeah, one of the surprising things is this concept of buyer first is interesting to me. And it's interesting that in what we found is 65% of sellers say they always put the buyer first. And only 23% of buyers agree. So it's about 1/3 of buyers, but there's more closeness in there, then you would think so what we found is that it's it's kind of a necessity to put the buyer first, especially in the first days of COVID happening, you didn't even know whether your buyer was, you know, in business anymore. So you really had to think buyer first, you know, some companies were doing very well like say Netflix or Peloton in the first days of the of the pandemic, they were doing well. And so maybe they were going to buy products. But then there were other at the other end of the spectrum, there were companies in the travel industry, let's say where they were probably completely on hold and that and not going to buy buy anything. So So we found that but this buyer first thing is very interesting with sales people sort of wanting to be buyer first. And buyers obviously wanting salespeople to be buyer first. But there's a disconnect in whether it's actually happening. And we found, we identified that we had six behaviors that we said, okay, these behaviors are inarguably buyer first. And some of them, for example, are providing free and easy access to product reviews and other content, that's a buyer first behavior. Staying actively engaged after the sale, to ensure value delivery, being completely transparent about pricing. All those are what we would call buyer first behaviors in the sales process. What we found is that both buyers and sellers totally agreed that these were important in the buying process. So we found that there was total agreement on that, but where we found the disagreement was, you know, buyers saying that sellers practice these behaviors all the time was, you know, around 30%. So similar to the number that said that, you know, sellers are putting buyers first. But we also found that individual sales people are saying like I put the buyer first. But, then they were also saying that we asked them about whether their organization puts the buyer first. And they said kind of they said no. They said I am, but my organization doesn't my organization put the buyer first all of the time. And the you know, for these buyer first behaviors that we were talking about providing free and easy access to product reviews and other content, staying actively engaged etc, was around 40% of the time they said that their organization put these behaviors into practice all the time. And so I think what that speaks to is that there are barriers in the organization to being buyer first and we found some of these barriers are kind of obvious, right like emphasis on short term sales or revenue goals. limited budgets, maybe limited commitment to training or inadequate coaching. Maybe it's just the organizational culture, or the lack of the right skill set among existing sales talent, because we know sales has gotten much more complex, especially in, say, the technology industry or you know, even old smokestack industries like manufacturing, etc, are relying more and more on technology. And so the sales process has become more complicated. But organizations aren't adjusting, and they're making it more difficult than it should be for the average salesperson to place the buyer first. And that's what we found. I think that's like one of the key takeaways from the state of sales report. AJ Wilcox 20:45 It sounds like the sales reps are ready for this change. They're creating the groundswell. And now it's the organization's time to catch up to come and do the right thing. Sean Callahan 20:55 I think largely, that's true. I mean, I think some sales organizations are well ahead of the curve. But yeah, I think sales managers and sales executives, you know, they need to take a look at their organization and kind of assess whether they are enabling their salespeople to do what they need to do to, you know, really, to sell in this current environment. And I don't think this current environment is going to change very much. I think remote work is kind of here to stay and virtual selling is going to continue to remain important. But there probably will be a hybrid as the pandemic begins to recede, where you're doing some in person along with virtual selling, and you're probably going to need to be skilled at both to be successful. AJ Wilcox 21:40 Oh, totally agreed. How do you think COVID has impacted virtual selling? And I know you already said this, but what do you think in the future? Why do you see that this is a change that that is so permanent? What makes you think that the world can't just go back to where we were pre-COVID? Sean Callahan 21:58 Yeah, I think that's a really interesting question. I was listening, we just happen to have a live event, live virtual event today where we were talking about this very thing. And it was a sales expert, Alejandro Cabral, he works in Argentina, for Kimberly Clark Professional. He said that evolution never goes backwards. And he was referring to you adapt these sales technologies, and they become de facto how you how business gets done. So the technologies that enabled salespeople to sell virtually in the pandemic, companies saw that, you know, hey we can close deals without getting in front of customers, we can reduce our travel and entertainment budgets, and still close deals. Buyers told us in this report that 50% of them in the US and even more globally said that buying became easier when they did it virtually. And they were working remotely. And buyers said by huge numbers that they would love to work more than, you know, I think it was something like 60 some percent wanted to work remotely more than 50% of the time. So this this remote work, which kind of requires a virtual selling approach is not going away. Companies see it as valuable, their employees like it, not only from the personal standpoint, but from the business standpoint, in fact that it makes buying easier. So I don't think any of this stuff is going away. I mean, obviously we're going to start to go back to conferences and meeting people as the vaccination levels go up. And the disease begins to recede. But these changes are permanent to a large degree. And it's in some way, because these changes were already happening with sales technology, enabling a lot of this virtual selling and closing deals without ever actually shaking hands with a person in the flesh. AJ Wilcox 24:03 Yeah, I agree with that. It's more like it didn't change the way that we do business. It just accelerated the change that was already in the works. And now we're living the way that Yeah, we probably naturally would have within three or four years, but COVID sure accelerated us towards it Sean Callahan 24:20 Yeah, accelerated is the word. I mean, this was coming. But it made it happen much faster in something that you know, your marketing audience might remember is like, I think 2008, 2009 that downturn really had an impact on the adoption of online advertising. I think online advertising was something that companies were doing, but in that downturn, they understood that it was cheaper, and they could prove immediately whether it was working or not. And in that era where there was such tight money, companies really move towards that much faster than they would have normally. And they moved away from things like print where it was harder to prove the value to online advertising. And that changed, you know, the value of advertising online like almost overnight. AJ Wilcox 25:13 And what a beautiful change that was. Yes, for you. It was a great, great change. True! You said something earlier that made me think of a quote that was actually in the report. I absolutely loved this quote. It's by the CEO of Flockjay, Help me with his last name, it's Shaan Hathiramani, is that close? Enough? Sean Callahan 25:32 Close enough AJ Wilcox 25:33 Okay, cool. He says the digital world is here to stay. The inefficiency of travel of in person business meetings, late night dinner appointments will make face to face meetings less common and not necessary. In many cases, organizations will use more data, more video more telesales? I don't think that we will go back to the world that was Sean Callahan 25:53 Yes. I totally agree with Shaan. I think that's he's absolutely right in everything. And I think we're seeing right, I don't think anything, you could argue with any aspect of that, quote. AJ Wilcox 26:06 Yeah. So it'll be interesting to see. Because there's, there's a lot of this stuff that was in person that was really annoying. And we wish we could do it remotely. And then there was a whole bunch of things like events and conferences, where, you know, we did a lot of that, for fun and for work. And I'm interested to see if that comes back, you know, raging. People have been locked inside for a year and a half or two years. Now, I can't wait to get out and meet people again. Or if people are just gonna say, oh, I found that I really liked being in my house. I don't think I need to do conferences anymore. Do you have any insights into maybe what can happen there with public events? Sean Callahan 26:41 Yeah, I think events will come back. And we talked about this hybrid idea, right? I think it's going to be harder to meet individually, like a buyer at our office, for instance, I think that's going to be hard, especially in the near term. Because I don't think companies want people from the outside coming into the office, it's just, you know, they're not sure it's safe yet. But I think that these conferences, especially the best ones, are going to thrive, because people still in this hybrid model are going to want to get together. And it's going to be maybe even more important than it was in the past. Someone was telling me a long time ago about why they thought that the events business would thrive in B2B, where publications might not. And this is, I think turned out to be true, is that events are the only thing that Google can't do. You know, in person, it's something that the online world doesn't enable us to do. But these events, you get to meet people meet new people, shake hands, go out to dinner, have a drink, whatever, that stuff is going to be more important at these events, because it's kind of going to be at least in the, say, foreseeable future, the only place you can do it. AJ Wilcox 28:00 I totally agree with that. My thought is, you know, so many of us are so burned out by zoom, we've participated in so many virtual events. And really, no matter how you slice it, the type of learning that you do in a virtual event is significantly different than the type of learning that you would do in person. And so I think people will be excited to get back to that level of learning where they're not multitasking. And yeah, thanks during that. Sean Callahan 28:25 Yeah, I mean, I'd love virtual events. And I think virtual events are here to stay. But the one thing that they lack, to the degree that an in person has is, you know, the aisles, the conference hallways where you meet people and talk to you know, that's an important part of a conference. And I think that's something that we're going to crave. AJ Wilcox 28:44 Yeah, good point, someone's gonna find a solution for that. Sean Callahan 28:47 Yes. Well, there are like, you know, there's sort of, you know, you got breakout rooms that virtual events and you have the chat down the side. But they're trying to approximate I think, the conference aisle-ways in hallways, AJ Wilcox 29:02 Yeah, you get some of the serendipity and meeting with those types of things. Boy, it's gonna be hard to replicate the I was just randomly standing behind this person that, you know, at a food truck, or we were both in line to ask a speaker a question and ended up striking the conversation. I hope we get to preserve those kinds of things. Okay, here's the quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into the rest of the interview. The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. AJ Wilcox 29:34 If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $135 million on LinkedIn Ads, and no one. I mean, no one outperforms us on getting you the lowest cost per lead. We're official LinkedIn partners, and you'll deal only with LinkedIn experts from day one. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to chat about your campaigns. We'd love to work with you. And definitely let us know that the podcast sent you. Alright, let's go ahead and jump right back into the interview. Out of curiosity, we've talked a little bit about how COVID really affected selling. But tell me how you think COVID affected the buying of the buyer side of all this? Sean Callahan 30:17 Yeah, well, I talked a little bit about the the remote work. And I think that's part of what's going on here that buyers 50% of buyers say that working remotely has made the purchasing process easier. That's from our survey data. And we also found that remote job postings, they're not going away, they've increased by more than 5x globally since the start of the pandemic. And that's, that's LinkedIn data, LinkedIn platform data, 64% of buyers in North America are working remotely more than half of the time. Again, that's our survey data and 70% of buyers want to continue working remote they have for more of the time in the future. So that's really transformational, I think. And for selling, it's huge that, you know, how we work in offices is going to change forever. I'm lucky or odd in that I've worked from home on 1, 2, 3, like five straight jobs. I've had a home office job since 1998. I've been working. But I think more and more people are going to be like that. Working from home all the time, we found that it's doable. There are obviously downsides like your resume, fatigue is a real thing. And people want to have connection with people. That's why conferences are going to continue to work. But there has been a definite shift. Like I said before, that that idea that evolution doesn't go backwards is real too. We're not going to be able to walk this back, the genie is out of the bottle. AJ Wilcox 31:49 I love that example you shared about the 2008 downturn and the adoption of online advertising. I hadn't considered that before. And I've been wondering like, ooh, is the world going to go back to the way it was? I think you just cemented in my mind that no, it's not this, this is an evolution. Sean Callahan 32:08 I really think so. Because that we didn't really go back to print advertising, you know, it hasn't really recovered AJ Wilcox 32:16 Oh yeah. Alright, so shifting gears here a little bit? How are sales organizations using data? Sean Callahan 32:21 Well, I do know that sales organizations are using tons of data and more all the time. And one of the key things is their metrics, how they measure success. And that has changed over the past few years. You know, the cliche is that sales organizations measure quota, individual quota and team quota. And what we're finding is that customer satisfaction, and customer retention are two of the top metrics for sales organizations, rather than individual quota and team quota. Those are still important. But they are not what they used to be as far as like far and away, what organizations are measuring organizations are taking a longer term view of the world. That's an important thing to take note of. They're also using a lot of data in how they go about identifying customers. They use it to identify accounts they can go after, industries they can go after, geographies they can go after. And you know, LinkedIn, frankly, is one place where you can find that kind of data. And that stuff is becoming more and more important. And one of the quotes in the state of sales is that you know, data for sales organizations has become table stakes. If you don't have data, you're sort of driving without your headlights. AJ Wilcox 33:56 Oh, beautiful.That was an amazing answer to a question I didn't think through very well before I just read it off. So let me ask you this one, how are sales organizations using the data from this report? Sean Callahan 34:10 Well, I hope they're they're using it to look at where they're headed, where this industry is headed. I think what this report does is there are several key insights about how to become a buyer first sales organization. And I think that's crucial. And I think the report also works to confirm what I think sales leaders understand in their gut, that remote working is here to stay. The virtual selling is a skill that you are going to need to succeed. And those kind of insights, I think this report can help sales organizations to prove to the rest of their company that there are certain changes that need to be made AJ Wilcox 34:59 Wonderful. Because we've talked about this report, it's obviously awesome is the furthest thing from a fluff piece that we've ever seen from from anyone. Where can we go and find this report? Where can our listeners go to, to actually, you know, search through these insights themselves? Sean Callahan 35:13 Yeah, we have a short length. That is, well, it could be shorter. Let's put it that way. But it's lnkd.in/stateofsales2021. So it's lnkd.in/stateofsales2021 AJ Wilcox 35:31 Perfect. And we'll throw that in the show notes as well, for those of you who don't have a pen around or just want to scroll down from your podcast player and hit that link. And, Shawn, and this can be either for you, business life or personal life. What are you most excited about that's coming up? Sean Callahan 35:50 Well, I'll do a business one, I've been talking about state of sales, this whole thing, we've got a little piece of state of sales, that's going to come out a little later in the year. It's what top performers do differently. So in the state of sales survey, we're able to identify sellers who met 125% or more of quota, and compare them to others who took the survey, and were able to identify certain things that these sellers do differently. And I'll give you a couple examples. To whet your appetite for this piece. It's top performers do more research, they actually spend a little bit less time selling than average performers. And they do their research those they're totally prepared when they they have a call. They by about 15 to 20 percentage points, they do more kind of things like look up person's LinkedIn profile, visit the company website, find out who's on the buying committee through Sales Navigator. They do those kinds of things, more than average performers. There's some other material in there, too. That's very interesting. But it's that that research piece and that total preparation piece that top performers have. And I will also tell you that this may be coming out after this, but I have the entire week from July 5 through July 9 off, and I'm looking forward to that. AJ Wilcox 37:12 Oh, very cool. Without divulging too much. Is there anything on vacation that you're really looking forward to? Or you're you're gonna make sure you do. Sean Callahan 37:20 I waste a lot of time in my life playing golf, and I will probably do that over that period of time. AJ Wilcox 37:27 Cool. I love it. Well, I'm super excited for that next report because that sounds exactly what we want to share with all of our clients and their sales teams. Let's get more of those 125% of quota folks out there. So Shawn, if people want to connect with you, what's the best place to do it? Sean Callahan 37:44 Well, you can always look at my LinkedIn profile. Or you can send me an email and my LinkedIn address, which is scallahan@LinkedIn.com. I would love to talk to anybody who wants to talk state of sales. AJ Wilcox 37:57 Love it. All right. Sean, thanks so much for joining us. We'd love to have you back again, sometime here soon. Maybe even talk about the what top performers do differently piece. So anyway, stay in touch. And thanks so much for coming on. Sean Callahan 38:09 Hey, thanks for having me. AJ really enjoyed it. Talk with you soon. AJ Wilcox 38:13 All right. See ya! Sean Callahan 38:14 Alright, 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. AJ Wilcox 38:35 All right, I've got some great resources for you today. First of all, there's a link to the state of sales report down in the show notes. That's lnkd.in/stateofsales2021. It's a little bit long. But yeah, just go click the link. Next is Sean Callahan. He mentioned his email address is scallahan. So that's scallahan@LinkedIn.com.. And there's also going to be a link to his LinkedIn profile, he'd love to connect with you all. I've also got a link to the new LinkedIn Ads certifications. So make sure you level up your own resume and go and get those ASAP. And I've also got a link to the new LinkedIn Ads course that I told you about. I'm super proud of it. Of course, I want you to take it, but certainly if you have anyone in your organization who is trying to level up or learn LinkedIn Ads, point them towards this course. It is by far the best resource out there. If you have any suggestions, any questions about the podcast, anything like that, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. Please do look down at whatever podcast player you're listening to right now. And rate us you know, subscribe. And definitely leave us a review as well. We'd love to shout you out. All right, with all of that. We'll see you back here next week, I hope. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryankmacinnis/ rmacinnis@linkedin.com twitter.com/rkmac LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Show Transcript: LinkedIn product pages just launched. And we've got some great news about what it means for marketers coming right up on the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ad show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. You may have heard about LinkedIn rolling out product pages since about the summer of 2020. We brought a friend of the show Ryan Macinnis back. And you might remember him if you listen to Episode 31. He is the Product Marketing Manager at LinkedIn who's over the products marketplace. He reached out to me a couple months ago and let me know about some really cool functionality that's coming to LinkedIn. And I had to keep it a secret from all of you. Sometimes we have to do hard things. And now we finally get to spill the beans about some really cool revelations with these new product pages. But first we highlight a couple reviews. Tom Tigwell from Great Britain says, "A trusted advisor. Without a shadow of a doubt, AJ is a trusted advisor for those interested in optimizing their LinkedIn ads to deliver high quality leads. Every podcast drops value and we appreciate your wisdom. Keep it up." Thanks, Tom. You are a total stud. And then we have Alessandra from Italy. She says, "Fantastico! Just what I needed to do a professional job in setting up a campaign for a customer. Great episodes, good insights and tips, useful resources, keep them coming. And I'm listening to all the episodes and taking notes, Grazie mille, as we say here, a thousand thanks. Alessandra from Italy." You're amazing. Hello, Alessandra, thanks so much for leaving such a kind review. And it's been a little while since I've been to Italy, but boy do I miss it. Everyone who's listening I want to feature you. So definitely go to whatever platform that you listen to podcasts on and give us a rating and review and I'll totally shout you out. Okay, with that being said, let's hit it. Ryan Macinnis is a Product Marketing Manager at LinkedIn over the products marketplace, which is a really exciting area of focus for LinkedIn. He's a marketer just like us. And we're excited to feature his insight. Ryan MacInnis, super excited to have you on again. Thanks so much for coming back. Thanks for having me. Oh, anytime. So obviously, we've had you on a previous episode, where we were talking about the Brand and Demand Playbook. Tell us what's new with you what's changed, and what you're working on now? Sure. So the Brand and Demand Playbook, which we launched back in September, was obviously a huge hit. And you obviously gave me the opportunity to talk about it here on your podcast. Since then, I've moved over from the sponsored messaging world where I was the product marketer for my first year at LinkedIn. And I've transitioned over to the pages team. So within the pages, ecosystem, all of the free tools that we know and love to help us expand our reach within our employee, community, or grow all of the advocacy work we're doing within our external facing communities. I joined that team at the end of last year, and I've been working on our new newest feature product pages. 3:08 Oh, yeah. So tell us first of all about product pages, what's LinkedIn's intent? And then how should we as marketers be thinking about how to leverage them and and be using them even already? 3:18 Sure. So product pages, at their core, are a new tab that companies will see that help them showcase the best of their products. And so for a long time, especially for larger companies, it's been really hard to separate your brand from your product. When you think about voice on a company page, company pages are top of funnel, maybe you're trying to share a response to something that's happening in the world or an update of what it's like to work at that company, there's really not a great place for you to spotlight and showcase products. And so if you think about product pages, this is our bottom of the funnel, pages offering, company pages, showcase pages, product pages, that give companies the ability to take all this work they've done growing their community organic community on LinkedIn, and channel that into product interest, and ultimately lead gen. That is our goal. So cultivating a product community and ultimately turning that interest into customers. And so I like to call it the digital storefront for your brand, which you know, it's kind of the greatest hits of all of your different assets on LinkedIn and on your website. So you can really showcase users that are using your product, rich media, how to use the product, as well as featured customers. Somebody like me is interested in using the product. I can see companies that aspirationally I'd like to be like and know, okay, directionally, they're using this tool to help them do what they do at that level. That's really exciting for me. So that's what it is. Our intent with it is to really give marketers one more tool in their tool belt, so they can take advantage of all of these things for free at the bottom of the funnel. And when you think about competitively smaller companies, it's really hard for them to stand out in the crowd when you're competing. In a market that has a really large incumbent, maybe you're in a noisy market, product pages are actually a great way to be discovered. So if you're a smaller company, in a space, like marketing automation, if you're looking at a competitor that has a really large following is really well known. That discovery aspect of seeing other products in that category gives you a fighting chance to be discovered and, and to showcase what you can offer to a prospective buyer. So that is our intent is to make it really easy for people who use the product to be advocates for it. And then people are interested in buying it or in the market have a really easy way to do that in correspond with the brand. And so that is some context of product pages. 5:40 Cool. Well, I don't think you'll find any marketer who's disappointed with this. This is obviously everyone wants leads, everyone wants more interaction for their products and services. So that's great. And just out of curiosity, because I know that the product pages have really been launching over here over the last few months, who's doing a really good job with their product pages. Who should we look at as an example or for advice? Yeah, that's a great question. And so first of all start with what the experience has been like over the past year. So we've really tried to understand what does it take to provide a new page that page admins find value in that marketers are really excited about, and make sure that we're doing it in a way that also members on LinkedIn, see as valuable. So at the end of last year, we shared that more than 10,000 products are now live, they have their own pages on LinkedIn. And it's really exciting. What we're doing now is we're rolling that out to new companies within the B2B software space. So that is a large amount of companies that you'll see over the next couple months, they're gonna get access to this. And so along the way, we've seen some really great examples, a couple that I mentioned, aside from LinkedIn campaign manager tool, which I know that you've left a review on, which was great, GitHub has a really great product page. Atlassian, generally, within their products that they have, I think they do a fantastic job. listing the ideal roles that are great fits for products, I think that's another highlight of product pages is when I land as a prospective buyer on a product page, I want to relate to the problem that this company or this product is solving, and to make me feel that I'm part of a community even if I'm not already a customer. So that's another good example. And I think Asana does a great job, from a project management perspective, another example of a noisy space, and then trying to find ways to really elevate your community to be advocates for you. I think those are three examples that I would highlight, Okay, we'll go check those out and see if we can build something similar. So from the perspective of a marketer, how do product pages help drive traffic and interest to us? Yeah, so product pages are one of the first things that you'll see if a company has one when they land on your company page. So it's really cool that this concept of a highlight reel, or most of what's new on your product page, or products are going to be one of the first things you'll see whether it's a company has added a new product page, or somebody left a new review. That is what gets surfaced pretty high up on someone's company page. So that's really exciting. In the long term, we're always looking for ways that we're going to drive additional sources of traffic to these pages. But I think in the short term, there are so many interesting ways that you can drive traffic to this page. We've had companies like Twilio say that they've actually included this in their internal employee advocacy platform, to say, "Hey, everyone, these are the tools that we work on every single day, we just got a product page, it's really cool. Share it on LinkedIn, tell everybody to go check out this product that you're really proud of." And so that's a really interesting way to drive traffic. And we've had other companies try to figure out how they can plug this into their LinkedIn ad strategy. So I know, that was one of the things that you and I talked about previously. But within even conversation ads, if somebody is going through that flow of evaluating whether or not they'd be a good fit for a product, it's a great way to keep them on LinkedIn without sending them to your website, and potentially losing that lead when they go to a different experience. So that's how marketers today I've been driving driving traffic to these pages. And like I mentioned, we're evaluating new ways to get more eyeballs on these pages as we roll it out more. 9:12 Oh, I love that. Just out of curiosity on the reviews because people can leave reviews. Is there an opportunity for moderating or responding to maybe like lower rated one? Yeah, it's a good question. Today, we're we're getting feedback from companies and how they'd like to interact with those who are leaving reviews. One of the things I'm personally most proud of is the very small amount of negative reviews or malicious reviews that we've seen on the platform. And I do think that there's an element of accountability that comes in your profile is tied to a person as opposed to maybe some anonymous individual that can speak differently when there's no accountability involved. And so we'll remove reviews if they're malicious and in any way they violate our terms of service, obviously or if they're false. So an example we use is, you know, LinkedIn doesn't work in New York, or there's just something that's not true. We have the tools to make sure that those are reviewed and removed if that's the case. And then we're working with page admins and marketers to understand how you'd like to respond. Do you want to be able to encourage people to upvote? reviews, make sure that the most helpful ones are first? Or would you like to go ahead and respond to the ones that are most pressing, maybe constructive, that can influence your product roadmap. So today, there's no opportunity to do that. But it's definitely something we're looking to do is to give these moderation tools an opportunity to be more involved and engaging with the community. Because at the end of the day, that's why people leave reviews because their customers, they're passionate about whatever that product is, or the problem that they solve. And we want to give marketers the ability to interact with them. 10:50 Oh, I love it. And then what about if we're marketing a certain product? Is there value in us? I think you said Asana sent out internally. Or maybe that was Twilio sent out internally, like, "Hey, everyone come in, like hop on the page and follow it." Is there value there in like, as many people as you can show that are using your product, or experts with it, to try to organically get more people seeing and exposed to the product? Is there like organic benefit there? Yeah, there's organic benefit in a really interesting and cool way. As somebody, we just rolled this out over the last couple months, this concept of being able to see who in your network is using a certain products. So if I were to go to JIRA, because I'm on the product team, I have a lot of product managers in my network, I think I have 113 connections that use JIRA in their day to day jobs. And so as a prospective buyer of JIRA, that makes me feel awesome, it makes me feel that I know that I've kind of come to the place where my network has told me, you know, this is a form of social proof and validation that we get when buying a car or asking a friend or recommendation on something. So when you get your network to share with customers, hey, we just launched this page, please go and you know, maybe add this product as a skill to your profile, it benefits you long term, because if a prospective buyer goes to that page, and sees that folks in their network, use that product that makes them feel a lot more comfortable, maybe presenting that product to their manager, or even bringing it on themselves to go ahead and become a customer. So there's a huge opportunity there. Oh, yeah. And I'm even thinking from an ads perspective. If someone wants to target let's say, Salesforce users. Right now, the way we have it is like Salesforce groups or Salesforce skills. It would be amazing in the future, if we had the ability to say, hey, let's target people who we know our users like they're certified users of the software. So I could definitely see how that could play into our ads targeting the future. So Ryan, before we hopped on, you were telling me about something that I thought was really exciting, which was lead gen forms on product pages. This is like being able to use the lead gen form function for something organic dealing with the company page, something that's not paid by ads. Tell us about this, like, how did you come to it? And how does it work? 13:07 Yeah, so as I mentioned earlier, product pages are great for bottom of the funnel conversion. But if you think about it from a buyer perspective, putting your website as the main CTA just feels like a lot of additional steps that someone would have to take to express interest. Like by being on a product page, you're showing a level of intent, where somebody as a marketer just would say, hey, this is pretty much as bottom of the funnel as it gets, if they go from awareness from a company page, or maybe they attended a webinar to now they're physically on the product page, looking at, you know, customer examples, and reading reviews like this is where we want to convert them. And so we were, in our mind thinking, if lead gen forms were on this page, the barrier to convert would be so low, that we would start providing a ton of value for a lot of these companies to start really promoting their product pages to start growing these communities a lot faster. And so lead gen forms on this page to your point, we've only had lead gen forms available through campaign manager for advertising platform, or if you're using it from an events perspective for from a registration point of view. And by having it on product pages, it's a really great way to expose a ton of marketers to something maybe they didn't have access to before. You know, maybe they maybe they're at a startup, they're at a company that isn't doing a ton with LinkedIn right now. They see this functionality, and it's a great way for them to say, product pages are providing a ton of great value for me today, what are ways that I can amplify this down the road, maybe I can put a product page as a carousel ad as somebody who's going through the experience of what does this page look like in the feed, or as I mentioned earlier on a conversation as if a sender is from a sales rep trying to get you to schedule a demo, and you know that maybe they're not going to do that within the first CTA product pages are a great way to evaluate that offer more. And then the Legion forum is just a great way to make sure that they within the LinkedIn ecosystem can take that action you want them to and you're still providing a ton of value while that barrier and that friction is very low. Great, are we going to have to have a campaign manager account? to set that up? Like, is that still gonna live within campaign manager? Or will lead gen forms be available right from the company page? 15:11 Yeah, they're gonna be available right from the company page. So you would be able to download leads, right from the admin view. And you'd be able to have a lead gen form behind one of your calls to action on a product page. So yeah, it's super easy. They're gonna even be able to download them right from the admin, admin view. And then you can upload them to your marketing automation software or your CRM. But we're essentially trying to make this as easy as possible and as transparent as possible, right. I'm a page admin, and I'm really excited about the team is doing it's so exciting to see leads are coming through a page, right? It's not something that you have to have a certain skill set to have access to what the lead gen number is, or a report that's generated, so it's going to be really accessible. Oh, and I'm assuming same partners, like you can still push right into your CRM. If you're Marketo, HubSpot, like those probably still use Zapier. Yeah, today, when we're launching lead gen forms, we're really focused on getting feedback. So today, the main functionality will be just the download capability. And from there, within our iteration of that, it will be working with partners to make this available within how it is today and campaign manager. But we wanted to find the lightest weight way to provide value. And just to start to build that behavior, where, you know, folks know that lead gen forms are a thing, here's what their value is, maybe somebody's never heard of lead gen forms on LinkedIn before, if they've only had a company page, and then from there, start to plug into the ways that they've used lead generation and other platforms. So that's the plan. 16:36 Yeah, that seems like such a no brainer, you're already getting leads from LinkedIn organically. And it's the same experience. Of course, you're gonna say, let me start wanting to promote some things that were added. Thank you. The other thing that I'll share that has been really cool for me to see is that many marketers, we talked to who managed company pages are different than those who run advertising campaigns on LinkedIn. So there's an opportunity for us to actually bring together marketers internally, to work on a shared objective, like if you think about historically, maybe the role of a company page or a showcase page, it's been around awareness, or it's been around trying to really grow a community at the middle to top of funnel. But a lot of these marketers really haven't had a way to contribute to a bottom of the funnel conversion metric like they would if you're running paid ads. And so we're seeing this really cool convergence, if you will, of personas within larger companies come together and actually collaborate and say, Hey, this is what what kind of messaging has worked really well on my ads, maybe you should use this in the description of a product page, or somebody who's built the product page says, Hey, we're really getting a lot of good traction on this page traffic point of view, you should think about promoting this in a piece of sponsored content or whatnot. So it's really been cool to see how those barriers have been knocked down even internally within these companies. Oh, yeah, that interplay? I mean, you're bringing marketing teams together, which is fantastic. Everyone should be doing that. And of course, I'm going to be curious about the interplay between product pages and ads. So how can we bridge those two worlds and be able to start promoting through campaign manager? I'm assuming because it's lead gen forms, there will be like a solid interplay between the two where you could maybe promote something that you've already been running organically or vice versa? How do we think about that? Yeah. So today, essentially, what the interplay is between campaign manager and product pages is using a product page like he would a website URL. In the early days of product pages, we're focused on two things. One is getting it to the scale that we can provide value, not only to companies but to members on LinkedIn. And then in the second act of this, trying to understand how we can make it even easier to amplify these pages. So I like to talk about the grocery store analogy, because I spent four years of my life working at a grocery store, where you want to make sure the grocery store is stocked before you go ahead, and you try to get people to even come. And then you open the doors when you're ready, you think okay, this has things for everyone. And then before you start to hand out flyers, you want to make sure that the grocery store is at least successful. And so well, I used to work for a grocery store that did flyers. So the flyer example might not be prominent anymore. But then from there, billboards, flyers, that sort of thing. So that's what really focuses product pages is today, we're working with a lot of marketers to view that URL as a way that they can plug into it, like a website URL, like they're doing a conversation ads, carousel ads, things like that. And then the other thing that's really cool about product pages, too, if you were to go to a product page and hit the share button, you can actually share that product page in the feed. So there's a little caption that will come up a little preview screen about that product. And it's a great way for you even organically as a company to share the things you're really excited about. But to answer your question. That's where we're focused on first is trying to get people excited about the organic offering, then making sure that there's a really easy way to think about how they would promote one through campaign manager and then from there, evaluating Let's figure out where we go from there. 20:01 And that seems to me like just such a no brainer when when I'm saying, Okay, do I spend all this time sending a request over to it to build me a new landing page or app, let's just send them to the existing product page on LinkedIn. Lincoln's already made sure this looks good on both desktop and mobile, it has everything I want. It's got, you know, customer stories and ratings. And all that definitely seems like a shortcut for marketers to start sending right there. And when can everyone expect to have product pages for their companies? What does that roll out look like? Also super excited if there's anything you can share about when some of these capabilities will kind of creep into campaign manager. And as advertisers can start to look forward to them? Yeah, I can't share anything on the campaign manager front, but you'll be one of the first to know when i when i do have more information on that. But what I will say is that we're starting very slow with product pages, because as I mentioned, we want to make sure we get the experience, right. So over the summer, we conducted a ton of interviews, we rolled out an alpha and a beta, just trying to make sure that the page was as we would call it, the greatest hits of your company, we want to make sure that it's kind of the skinny version of your website, so that it has everything you want, that you found helpful when it comes to converting prospective buyers, we can have that there. And so we had just over 10,000 product pages live by the end of December, which is really exciting. And this quarter, we're rolling it out to many, many more B2B software companies. And so it's probably 2030 fold the amount of companies they'll have access to. And our goal by the end of this quarter is every B2B software company will have access to a product page. And we're starting with B2B software for a couple of reasons. One, members on LinkedIn are already talking about these products every single day, like they've had, they've never really had a place where these can all come together so that that information can be accessible to everybody. So if I'm really skilled in campaign manager, and I have that as a skill on my profile, and I've been talking about it in the feed, how do we get everybody to make sure that you know who in your network is using this and you can reach out to them if you want to do that. So we're focused on b2b software. It's the most amount of, of products that the members associated with today, and it's a great way for us to understand at that scale, what works really well within this marketplace before we start to bring it to other use cases and verticals. But that's where we're really focused today. Great. And if someone is in B2B software, but somehow maybe they just didn't have it on their website properly, or anything. Is there an application process? Is there a way that someone can can start one? Or do they just have to publicize it nicely on the website and wait for LinkedIn to come crawl? 22:43 That's a good question. So and this happens, where, you know, maybe they see a week lag between a competitor in this space having access, and then it's, we are rolling it out slowly, they can reach out to me directly if they'd like to. It's rmacinnis@linkedin.com . Or we have an alias that they can they can email that's product pages-feedback@linkedin.com. And both of those will actually get routed to me. So I try to respond to almost every single one. And we'll evaluate it if it is a product and a software product. Indeed, we'll we'll do that, but I think one of the most interesting things is it's caused a lot of marketers to ask themselves, am I a product or my service? And you know, is this a feature or is this a product? And as a marketer, I would think it's a very good thought experiment, even to think about our own positioning to go back to our team and say, "Hey, we should really think about how we can play in this space, because this is what's going on here." So they can reach out there if they are indeed a B2B software company. Fantastic. All right, I'll put your the product email address in the show notes that way people aren't like bombarding you personally. Sounds good. Okay, that sounds great. Another question I've got, how should marketers think about product pages in terms of their overall marketing strategy? At what point would you say this is super valuable for someone to pay attention to their product page, and maybe put something else on the shelf? 24:03 Yeah, so one of the most interesting stats, and I'm sure it's higher now is that more than 70% of buyers are completing the buyer journey in a digital only environment in a digital only setting, which means that the likelihood you talk to a sales rep before making a purchase is very slim. And so as marketers, we should think about how we can use this to empower our teams at all aspects of the funnel. And so the reason why I say you should use it as much as possible as one, it's free, you can create one at any time, it's free to use. Two, it really has everything that you would want to look at, if you're trying to convince someone that this is a good product for them. So maybe there's already people in their network that use it. And if you're a sales rep, you've already identified what that messaging is. You can also see the companies they use a product and there's also an opportunity for the brand to showcase product tutorial videos, rich media of what certain dashboards or features may look like. And so if I'm being prospected into, and I see all of these things on day one on LinkedIn, that's a really interesting way to get my attention. So it's new, it's exciting, not a ton of companies are doing it. As I mentioned, we're slowly rolling this out, it's a good way stand up. And it's different than just sending somebody to your website, and hoping that this landing page, you've optimized for other channels is going to go ahead and get their attention and get them to convert, which means that you're gonna have to send them a five to seven touch email to get them to come back around. So as a marketer, I would say, because this is such a lightweight thing for you to stand up, you should be using this at all stages. And then give it to your team, so your customer success team should be asking your customers to add this product as a skill to their profile to leave a review, if they'd be so inclined. And your sales team should be using it maybe as their footer for email outreach, or even just to say, Hey, we were a part of something really new and exciting that LinkedIn is rolling out, we think it would be a really good way for you to get to know our products get to know our brand a bit more, you should check it out. So I think it presents a ton of new opportunities for marketers to really differentiate themselves and help other teams 26:05 along the way. I love it. Okay. And obviously, before we go off to the product, I'm going to ask about you like, personally, professionally next, but anything else that you want to share with us? Anything you're really excited about with product pages, or anything else that we haven't covered that you'd want people to know? No, I think that I would just say, I'm really excited about this. I always think about this, as Ryan, the marketer before joining LinkedIn. Ryan as somebody who's always struggling to differentiate myself from the competition. And it's really hard if you don't have the same budget, if you don't have the same market notoriety to really play on the same playing field. And product pages, as I mentioned, they give a ton of great opportunities for marketers to be on the same playing field from a discovery point of view, and to see what other products are in similar categories. And so we're always going to keep that in mind of like, how do we make this a true marketplace where people can go and find the right products for them. And then at the end of the day, make this really valuable, not only for the companies, but for the members, people who are coming to these pages, who are either users to say, here's what I love about the products, or as a prospective buyer to say, hey, this is what i'd love more information on. We're always going to be evolving these pages. But I'm really excited about how they turned up as a start. So cool. Ryan, thanks so much for sharing that. And my last question for you is basically what are you most excited about either, personally, professionally, or you can list one for both. But what what's in your world that you're excited about? 27:32 Sure. So I'll list one for both because I'm selfish. So today, I finally I have a puppy, a three month old puppy, my dog finally was able to use the bathroom outside today. We've been trying to get him to do that over the last couple weeks. He's gotten used to going to the bathroom inside. And so this is big news, what a way to start the week off. So that's what's exciting me personally, I feel like I'm making progress on my dog. What's exciting me professionally, is I think that the way that teams are working together marketing teams, during this time, where everybody is at home, is really exciting. I think we were nervous about it at the beginning of the pandemic. And there are so many great ways for us to stay involved to stay connected from a marketer, using the LinkedIn pages ecosystem, for example, there's so many great things, both internally and externally to really bring your company together. And I actually think that a lot of the success that marketers are seeing is going to influence how companies go back to work. And so that's what's exciting me professionally. Oh, that's cool. Seems a little bit what we'd expect that by forcing ourselves to be separate, it brings us together, but I think you're absolutely correct there. Well, Ryan, I'm super excited to have you on for round two. So I definitely hope there's around three. Thanks for sharing such awesome news with us. Do you want just share again, like if people want to follow you? People want to reach out and give product feedback? How can they do that? Sure. I would say the easiest way to reach out to me is my email. I'm totally fine. Giving that out. It's rmacinnis@linkedin.com if you want to connect with me, also great place to share feedback there. And if you're on Twitter, I'm @rkmac 29:14 @rkmac? @rkmac. Okay, beautiful. All right, everyone listening make sure you go follow Ryan. Keep him in mind as your as you have feedback from a marketing perspective. Remember, he was a marketer before he was a LinkedIn Product Manager. So excited to have you on our side and building great stuff for us. Thanks so much, Ryan. Thanks for having me, AJ. I've got the episode resources for you coming up. So stick around. Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. Okay, I promised you some great episode resources. So here they are. In the show notes below. You'll see a link to Ryan Macinnis his profile on LinkedIn, give him a follow connect with him. There's also his email address if you want to reach out and give him any feedback, also a link to his Twitter. Now I've got some fun news. I've talked to you a lot about the course that I did with LinkedIn Learning. And it is, of course, the best resource if you or someone on your team is looking to learn LinkedIn Ads, you should definitely check it out. But I've got some exciting news that within the next couple or few months, the course is going to be fully updated. We're working on that now. So I'm super excited to have you see all the new updated material. So check that out. Please look down on whatever podcast player you're using right now and hit subscribe if you want to hear me in your ear holes. And like we mentioned at the top of the episode, make sure to rate and review and I would love to shout you out. With any topics on your wish list or ideas or for feedback, whatever. Email us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Congratulations to the LinkedIn Ads Show contest winners! It's fortunate that this week's episode is all about creating the perfect ad, when we also get to reveal the 3 winning ads in our performance contest! We had so many incredible submissions, showing us examples on how to be rockstar marketers on LinkedIn.  Here were the winners (in no particular order because they're all rockstars) along with their high-performing ads and landing pages: Winner #1: Highest CTR and Lowest CPC Zoltan Kozma from CBRE Hungary CTR: 5.60% & CPC: €0.14 Why so Amazing? LinkedIn's average Click Through Rate for Sponsored Content is ~.4% and Cost Per Click is in the $8-12 range. That's why getting a CTR that was 14 times higher than average is excellent. With a CTR that is 14X the average, paying by CPM, Zoltan found himself paying a tiny fraction of what competitors would be paying. It's targeted to an audience who had already been really responsive on a past campaign, so he knew he was setting the company up for success. It's an organic company Page post that he boosted, so it had good social proof from the start, which helps. It also leads to an article on Forbes Hungary, which helps increase trust. Not only did he find that the article was getting tons of cheap traffic, but he also noticed ~35 new followers from the effort over a short period of time.  Well done Zoltan!   Winner #2: Highest Landing Page Conversion Rate Alex Panchuk from Reply.io Conversion Rate: 62.14% Why so Amazing? We call any offer on LinkedIn that gets over a 15% conversion rate a "Rockstar Offer." Alex ran this video creative(traditionally harder to get good performance from) to a cold audience, with an external landing page (think of how much higher the conversion rate would have been if it were a Lead Gen Form Ad), and on top of that, they required a Business Email, and it still got a 62% conversion rate! It pushed 65 unique downloads, plus a couple of view-through conversions for good measure. Obviously the high conversion rate has so much to do with the offer and the landing page, so check that out here: https://reply.io/cold-email-handbook/ Nice Work Alex!   WINNER #3: HIGHEST CONVERSION RATE Eric Southwell from SupremeOpti Conversion Rate: 65.40%   Why so Amazing? We would have guessed that the highest-converting winner would be through a LinkedIn Lead Gen Form ad (On average, they convert 10-50% better than landing pages) but this blew us away. This is a 65% conversion rate, on an ad and offer that has been running for 7 MONTHS now to a cold audience! Most ads on LinkedIn wear out their audience after ~1 month, but this ad/offer is like a fine wine and performance has actually continued to improve over time. UNHEARD OF! On top of the leads it generated, it also drove 9 CONVERSIONS, which is likely from viral signups that wouldn't have been served the Lead Gen Form. Eric, you slayed it!   Honorable Mention: Highest Conversion Rate Lindsay Beaulieu from Worcester Polytechnic Institute Conversion Rate 325%! When we saw Lindsay's submissions, we had to take a double-take. It's ultra-rare (I dare say, impossible) to get a conversion rate over 100%. When we looked into it, we found it was a Text Ad, and the vast majority of the conversions were view-through conversions. Ok, so you might say "LinkedIn wasn't responsible for those conversions since they were view-through," but this is a testament to me that Lindsay's team is targeting the right audience across multiple channels. The huge amount of view-through conversions on Text Ads (which show a ton of impressions) is proof that her other channels are targeting excellently and we see those reflected in LinkedIn's metrics. Thanks for teaching us Lindsay!   Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: DRIVE Sales: The 5 Secrets to Increase Your Sales by 400% by Woody Woodward   LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Show Transcript: We've created the formula for the perfect LinkedIn Ad. And of course, we're going to share it with you because we're not the type to hold back. This is the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. So writing ads is an incredibly involved task, it doesn't seem overly difficult because you have some characters that you have to stay within. And then you kind of get to write or put whatever you want. But then, of course, you have to keep in mind who your audience is. And then what's interesting to them. And of course, you have to communicate what you have to offer them. But without asking too much, so they get overwhelmed, and you have to stay within the character limits. That's a lot to keep balanced. So today, I'm going to walk you through our ad creation process, and let you in on a little bit of the B2Linked secret sauce for how we create high performing ads. First of all, I'm sure many of you notice that this is our first episode in a couple months. And thank you to so many of you who emailed and messaged asking if I'm doing okay. That means a ton to me. So what originally happened is around the holiday of Thanksgiving here in the US, I ended up getting knee surgery. Right near the beginning of COVID, I ended up having a lot of knee pain after some hiking. And I love hiking, I do a lot of it. But that pain didn't go away for a long time. So I finally went to go see a doctor. We did everything we could and eventually we decided it had to be surgery. Without getting too graphic here. My meniscus, which is like the padding in between my knees, what takes all the impact as I'm running downhill, it was torn into places, my cartilage was messed up and needed to be kind of burred down. And my knee cap was too far over to one side, so they released it so it would go more in track. I expected this to be something very simple and I would be just back at work the next day. But boy, it it really sidelined me. For like a week I was on medication and laying down in bed just trying to get work done. So podcast had to go on hold. Plus, around that time we had the holidays, which present their own little bits of complication, as we have family all around and you know, four kids and all that. Plus, I worked on two giant audits for Fortune 500 companies. And as a company, we just moved into bigger offices, we just hired six new people, and now we're training them. And then something I think you might find really exciting. I'm in the process of working with LinkedIn Learning to update our LinkedIn Learning course that I talked about every episode. So with all of that going on, basically this is the first episode in a little while. Where we left off, there was a contest running for a LinkedIn Ads performance contest. And I'm so excited to announce the winners and tell you what they did that was so amazing, and how you can replicate it to get better performance for your own ads. I wanted to give a quick shout out to any of you who are listening from the Instazone site. We were recently featured on there so thanks so much for those of you who are joining us potentially for the first time here. So getting here into the contest, thank you to everyone who submitted. There were so many entries. We had some amazing entries and it took a lot of work by me and my team, but we did go through and select three winners. For those of you who aren't up to speed, in November, I announced a LinkedIn Ads performance contest. And I promised that the prize would be awesome and super unique, but I couldn't share with you what it was. Well, the time has come, I finally get to share with you what the prize is. Because LinkedIn doesn't have hourly reporting, we know that there are certain times of the day where performance is going to be better than others, but we can't prove it because there's no hourly reporting. Well, what we've figured out is we can go into an account, and we can have our team go in and take all of the performance every hour, and then just subtract it from the total. So we're getting only the performance during that hour. This is of course a lot of work. But we've put together a really cool dashboard, where you can look at it in your own time zone, you can see what times of day, and which days of the week perform better than others. So for you three winners, congratulations! You're about to get something that we've been really excited about internally. And it will give you insights like what time of day your audience wakes up, and when they go to lunch, and all of that good stuff. Okay, so how we selected the winners. It was a contest to see who could show us what gets the best click through rates, the lowest costs per click, and then the highest conversion rates, which of course leads to the lowest cost per conversion. We selected the winners by analyzing all of the top submissions, and then we reached out and actually verified, we got account access, we verified that all the metrics were what they looked like. We took into account the competitiveness of the geographies that were targeted, and the strategy being used. And then more than anything, I wanted to just highlight these amazing marketers and what they're doing so that you can learn from them and improve your own strategies. So without further ado, here are the three winners in no particular order. We have Alex Panchuk from Reply.io, who he happens to live in the Ukraine and I lived in the Ukraine for a couple years. So it's very near and dear to my heart, Alex, congratulations. Then we have Zoltan Kozma, from CBRE Hungary in Hungary. And then finally, we have Eric Southwell is the Chief Marketing Officer of Supreme Optimization and he's a total globetrotter. I love following everything he's doing. And I do have one honorable mention, I couldn't make this a fourth winner, but Lindsay Beaulieu, who's the Digital Marketing Specialist at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts. She did something amazing that I think is really good for us to hear about. So we'll highlight a little bit of her strategy here, as well, all four of you, thank you for being loyal listeners. Thank you for just being rockstars and showing the rest of us marketers how to do what we do better. Alex PanchukSo starting with Alex Panchuk from Reply.io. His entry had a conversion rate of 62.14%, which is amazing. Candidly, the highest conversion rates that we've ever seen have been 59%. So he absolutely blew even my records away, which I'm ecstatic about. And of course, you'll be able to go down into the show notes and take a look at the ads themselves, like a screenshot, you can see the landing pages that were really high converting where applicable. So go and check these out and learn from them. Some things that Alex did really well, as well as some of the things that made this truly impressive. First, he required business emails, and we know that when you make it a little bit more difficult for people, then we see conversion rates come down. So this is an amazing conversion rate of 62%, when they're still requiring business email. Plus, there was an additional question in there. And this was right when square video on LinkedIn Ads came out and so very few did it. And I think that helped it stand out quite a bit. So Alex, congratulations, everyone, go check out his ad and his landing page, so you can learn more about it. 7:29 Zoltan Kozma And next, Zoltan Kozma. And I'm so sorry for anyone that I'm butchering your name, he won for having both the highest click through rate and because of that the lowest cost per click is click through rate was 5.6%. And his cost per click came out to 14 cents. What was so amazing about this is that it was created to look native. It goes to an external site and so there's there's nothing gated. This was pure value to create awareness. And it was an interview article. And one that actually started out as an organic post from the company page and then it was boosted once it had 122 likes and some comments. What Zoltan did to get this is he went and found an audience that he'd already targeted earlier who happened to be really responsive. He released this content that was really easy to consume, there wasn't any jargon. And it sure doesn't hurt that the page that it's going to was actually Forbes. And then with click through rates that were so high, you know, over 5%, my recommendation would be to use either auto bidding, or bid CPM really high to make sure you're always showing up in the top position. But this blew me away. It was a manual CPM bid, but it was bidding below the recommendation. Which generally produces pretty poor results, but in this case, it rocked. So in addition to getting really good ad performance, they also got 30 to 40 new followers. So that was a happy byproduct of these ads. It was created in the engagement objective. So I wanted to look in and see okay, you know, which were actual clicks on the article, and then which ones were engaging with the ad like, likes, comments, visiting the company page, following the company page, etc. And 3% click through rate was actual clicking through to the article, so that's amazing. And then the rest were followers and likes and comments, therefore helping it go out viral. Zoltan, nice work. I'm super excited for you. It was really impressive. Even though it was outside the US where it's quite a bit less competitive, this was still amazing, and I had to give it to you. 9:43 Eric Southwell Next is Eric Southwell from Supreme Optimization. Eric's team absolutely destroyed with a 65% conversion rate. So that's even higher than Reply.os', but what's even more impressive to me is that these ads have been running for six plus months, they still have a 65% conversion rate, even after six months of running the same offer. That was totally legit, I loved it. And as I looked over time, cost per lead has actually been going down over time. Now, this was 65% conversion rate on native lead gen forms, which makes sense. I totally thought the conversion rate winners would be using lead gen forms, but what I also liked is that not only did they have leads from the lead gen form, they also had conversions coming through so that was people who weren't even part of the target audience who were seeing the post and going and actually completing the form on the site. It averaged $5.18 cost per click. And they were not bidding the absolute minimum cost per click here. And the vast majority of that traffic, those conversions were coming from the US. Eric, super impressive. Congratulations, got to hand it to you. 10:58 Lindsay Beaulieu And then we had Lindsay Beaulieu, who is our honorable mention. Now, when she submitted, it was an over 100% conversion rate. And so I got really excited, like, what in the world would cause an over 100% conversion rate. When I dug into the account, I saw that it was a text ad. And I know that text ads get shown to a lot of people, a lot of times at high frequency. So immediately, I went to go look at the conversions. And the vast majority of conversions were coming through as view through conversions. And so for purposes of this contest, I wasn't counting view through conversions as being like real conversions here. But I wanted to use this as an example, because all of us could and should be using text ads to just very expensively cover your audience, your ideal target audience. So they're seeing your ads, they're seeing your brand. And then of course, when they're converting on other channels, we can see that yes, LinkedIn is contributing here. So Lindsay, nice work. Thanks so much for sharing such an awesome example with us. 12:04 Reviews HighlightsA quick highlight on reviews that we've gotten on the podcast. Lea Pica shares, "Where deep passion, expertise, and value divinely connect. AJ is one of the digital marketing industry's best love speakers for good reason. His massive knowledge base in a platform that is otherwise to disdain allows him to deliver insane value in a truly actionable way. Don't walk away from getting started with LinkedIn Ads without giving him a good listen." Lea, thank you so much for leaving that you are awesome. For those of you who don't know, Lea Pica is the host of the Present Beyond Measure podcast and she is absolutely amazing. If you want to learn anything about data storytelling, or data visualization, you have to check out what she does, and her show, of course. And then Dan Marzullo, from Marzullo Associates, he shared, "Highly recommended. If you're getting started with LinkedIn Ads, AJ is your guy." Dan, thanks so much. Dan is the founder of Podcast Bloggers, so he knows a thing or two about podcasts. So a huge thanks to you for being a listener of ours. And of course, everyone who's listening, I want to feature you. So definitely, wherever you're able to review, and I totally want to feature you. Okay, with that being said, let's hit it. 13:15 LinkedIn Users Are In a Hurry Some things that you definitely want to keep in mind about writing ad copy, and creating ads on LinkedIn is that in general, LinkedIn users are in a hurry. It means you've got to cut right to the chase, and front load everything with value. When I know that people are in a hurry, and I need to catch their attention in just a split second, I'm probably going to lead the ad was something like, Hey, did you know that x&y, or people like you are losing out. The really attention grabbing statements right at the beginning are the best thing to do. You don't want to lead with our brand name does such and such in the industry, that will just get ignored. Imagery And then of course, you have a visual component to your ads as well. Most of the time, we're using static ads. But of course, you can use video as well. The rules that you want to follow with imagery is realize that LinkedIn, when you look at the whole color palette, when someone's there, they see a lot of blues, grays and whites. And so if you ask a designer, what do you need in order to stand out from blues, grays and whites, they'll point you towards the color wheel, and they'll say, go and find whatever is opposite of blue on that color wheel. And of course, that takes us to orange. So one of the best tips I can give you is use lots of orange, reds, greens in your ads, because that will stand out from the rest of the fluff that's on LinkedIn. I also follow the billboard rule. Those of you who are Facebook, advertisers will probably know the 20% rule that I've heard isn't getting anyone punished anymore. But it used to be that on Facebook, you couldn't show an ad that had more than 20% I have the image as being text, and then for a long while, you could put it in the image, but then it would stunt the performance of your ads. LinkedIn has never had anything like the 20% rule, which is fantastic. We've always been able to put as much text in an image as we want. But we've also found that the more text in an image, the less likely people are to read it. It looks like a giant wall of text to them and so they're disincentivized, from even starting to read. So because of that, we follow the billboard rule. So don't try to sell with copy in your image. That's not the images job, the job of the image is just to be a thumb stopper, it's just to get them to stop scrolling, so that they'll read your ad copy. So the billboard rule for those of you who don't know, is use seven or fewer words, because that's all the time that you're going to get from someone as they pass by your billboard on the freeway is get a good six or seven words in. Video Video is a little bit different. So with video, depending on their connection speed, there's going to be just a split second, or maybe even several seconds while your video is starting to load. And that's really important time because that's time where people are scrolling past, and they may not get a chance to see what it is that you're showing. So with video, I like to make sure that within the first two seconds, there is some kind of action happening. So don't start with a black screen fading to your logo and waste several seconds, you'll lose your entire audience with that, you need to show them something that's exciting, interesting, and worth their time. And then also make sure that you put a thumbnail in there because the thumbnail is what's going to show up in the videos place while it's loading on their screen. So have a really cool visual, something that gets their attention. And then of course, LinkedIn video, it's the same as all the other social video, it's going to play autoplay, but muted. And so you need to make sure that you have subtitles on that video so that 80 plus percent of people who are going to watch it without sound can still get drawn in and follow along. I like to suggest keeping videos really short, like 15 to 25 seconds short. But of course, depending on your video creative, you could probably make a 10 minute long video work really well, just depending on how creative and how attention grabbing it is. 17:20 Alright, here's a quick sponsor break. And then we'll dive into some of the secret sauce, along with our formula on how you create the perfect ad. The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $135 million on LinkedIn Ads, and no one outperforms us on getting you the lowest cost per lead. We're official LinkedIn partners, and you deal only with LinkedIn experts from day one. So fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com. to chat about your campaigns. We'd love to work with you. 18:03 DRIVE All right, let's jump into creating the perfect ad. What we've learned over time is that your motivation to convert or engage is incredibly important. It's one of the most important things there is. And so one of our secret sauces as an agency is writing compelling ad copy. And the reason that we're so good at this is because of the book and teachings by someone by the name of Woody Woodward. And his book is called Drive Sales Secrets. I've put links to the book and links to his website down below in the show notes. But the gist is that the entire population breaks down into five different kinds of motivations. And the first letter actually spells out the word drive. DRIVE. The D stands for director. And this is someone who cares about freedom and creativity. Then the R in DRIVE is a relator. Someone who cares about relationships. The I is for intellectual. This is someone who cares about systems and processes and blueprints. The V stands for validator, this is someone who cares about recognition and appreciation. And then finally, the E is for executive. And this is someone who cares about proof and crushing the competition and winning. So the concept in the way that we use this is that people have a natural inclination towards a certain type of motivation. And there are some professions where people have similar drives tend to aggregate. For instance, the majority of the CEOs of the Fortune 500 are executives. They are win at all costs, crush the competition. Proof is what wins. And then when you look at the accounting industry, the majority of accountants are intellectuals. They love systems processes. That's what convinces them. So if you know what's likely to drive your ideal persona, you can start to write really compelling ad copy that caters to them. I know this is very high level. This is hard to follow on a podcast. But I'll share just a brief example of how I might customize ad copy to each of these drives. 20:09 So if I were writing ads to directors, and let's say we're trying to sell some kind of software, remember that directors are those who are really excited by freedom and creativity, I might say something like, "This will help free up time to give you freedom." With relators, who again, are super interested in their relationships, I might say something like, "It will strengthen your relationship with your CFO to have this software" or to be on top of this processs. With intellectuals, those who are really interested in systems and processes and blueprints. I might say, "This software contains the complete blueprint on how to drive your goals." With validators, those who are really interested in recognition and appreciation and praise, I might say, "This software will make you the hero." And with executives, again, those are those who care about proof and crushing the competition, I might say, "This software will get you out in front of your competition, you'll be on the bleeding edge, check out these ratings and testimonials." In so many of our tests around different drives. What we do is we come up with a hypothesis of which drive or drives are likely found in this target audience and then we run some ad copy tests to see what the lift in click through rate looks like. And that gives us how effective this drive ad copy is. And this has been fantastic for us, so I highly recommend, go get Woody's book, find out what drive you are, and find out what drives you're trying to cater to. 21:39 Anatomy of the Perfect Ad So the next bit of secret sauce here, we have what we call the anatomy of the perfect ad. And we're going to use sponsored content as our example here, because it's the most common ad format. What we have in a sponsored content ad, we have an intro, it's the text that comes above the image or video. Then we have the headline, which is the text that goes below the image or the video. And then of course, we have the image or the video, we'll pretend this is a static image, and that you've already followed my rules from the previous section where the image has seven or fewer words, and relies a lot on the oranges, reds, greens, purples to help it stand out. So then we go to the most important part of this ad, which is the intro. In all of our testing, we have found that changes to the intro sway ad performance the most. More than image changes, more than headline changes. The intro is super valuable. We try to keep this under 135 characters because the shorter the better here. And we like to include two different pieces. The first thing that all of our sponsored content ads contain is why you should pay attention some kind of pain point or benefit. Remember, this is what we're using to get their attention. So if they're scrolling and you say, hey, do you have this pain point, they're likely to read on and say, ooh, does this person have a solution for me. That's going to make up the majority of that 135 characters. And then what comes after is the second piece that's required here is the call to action. So this is where we will include a succinct short call to action that strong. So it might be download our FREE eBook today, or join the webinar to learn how to do this yourself, something like that. So intros, keep them short. The two pieces you want are number one, why you should pay attention and number two, your call to action. Then we get down to the headlines and headlines we found to make the next most biggest difference. So if you're testing things, I would test intro first and then headline second. Try to keep your headline under about 55 characters if you can. And the two pieces that we like to include here are number one, and we do this in square brackets, which many of you may have already seen something like within square brackets. We tell them what to expect what the asset type is. So if I'm doing a webinar in square brackets at the beginning of the headline, I might say free webinar or free guide, something like that. And then the second piece you want to include here is actually the title of the asset. So I'm sure you and your marketing team worked really hard to come up with a great title for this asset. This is where you get to show it off. And as you're writing ad copy, and this applies to every network out there. But remember, you're not writing ad copy for yourself based off of the benefit that it brings you. You're writing to the benefit of someone else. So I keep in mind the acronym WIIFM, I call it everyone's favorite radio station. It stands for what's in it for me. As you're writing ad copy, make sure you are crystal clear about what's in it for the prospect. In order for them to want to see it, click on it, and then convert. All right here come the episode resources, so stick around. 25:08 ResourcesThank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. In the shownotes, you'll see the winners of the contest their ads, their landing pages, where applicable, definitely go and check those out and learn from them. I also have the links to Woody Woodward's book and the drivesalesbook.com website where you can learn more about the drive sales process. And if you're just getting started with LinkedIn Ads, or maybe you have a colleague who is let them know about the course, the LinkedIn Ads course on LinkedIn Learning. The link is right down below. And also, if you watch over the next couple months, you'll see that we're in the middle of updating that so there should be a new version of the course to get excited about so keep an eye on that. If you're not already subscribed, look at your podcast player right now and hit that subscribe button. We'd love to have you listening on future episodes. And please do rate and review the podcast. It really helps other LinkedIn Ads marketers find us and want to listen and share with us. If you have any tips, questions, or anything you'd love to see featured on the show, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week, cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Enter the Contest! bit.ly/linkedinadscontest LinkedIn fixing false metrics Writeup of the GenZ research Free chapter of Instabrain: bixaresearch.com/freechapter LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Show Transcript: Generation Z is coming into the workforce in droves. How are they using LinkedIn? And how will you market to them? Stay tuned, we'll find out. This is the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics, as many of you may know, Generation Z is the massive and up and coming generation. They're shaping popular culture. And they're beginning to graduate out of school and into the workforce. We here at B2inked really wanted to know how the coming generation both thought about and uses LinkedIn so we can see what the future of LinkedIn ads platform might look like. So we've partnered with a good friend of mine, Sarah Weise, who happens to be the CEO of the market research firm, Bixa research. I'm not sure how much I'm able to disclose. But let's just say that her firm is amazing at research. Since she gets to work with brands like a search engine that starts with the letter G, and a payment processor that rhymes with Hey Pal, we went out and interviewed a bunch of Gen Z members. And the results were pretty surprising. We'll dig into our findings, as well as ideas on how you can better relate to them. In the news, the big thing this week was the announcement that LinkedIn was misreporting some of their metrics. And they're going to be issuing some refunds out to their clients. In the article that LinkedIn shared on their marketing solutions blog by someone amazing that I have a lot of respect for Gyanda Sachdeva, we discovered two measurement issues. Here's how we're making it right. And you may have received some emails this week, or maybe it's an email, I don't know, where they're letting you know that some of the accounts that you're on may have had misrepresented impressions or video stats. In the article Gyanda mentions that in August, their engineering team found and then fixed two measurement issues that were causing to over report impressions and video views. She says that these issues potentially impacted about 418,000 customers over a two plus year period. So this sounds pretty serious. But then she goes on to say that more than 90% of the customers who had an impact equated to less than $25 US. So they said that they're committed to making it right, which is awesome. And I remember the same thing happened with Facebook a few years ago, when they were miscalculating video impressions. And I just kept thinking it would have been so easy for LinkedIn to just brush this under the rug and move on. And I absolutely admire the LinkedIn leadership so much for deciding to make this announcement public. If you're anything like me, you read the emails and went, huh. So I'm still waiting to understand more of what they mean and what the process for reimbursement is going to be like. Because I received several emails the first week that said that we need to contact support for the ad credits for every account. And then I got another email this week that was a little bit different, and made it seem a bit more like the credits would be given automatically. And I sure hope so because I have no desire to go and file like 100 different support tickets with LinkedIn just to get less than $25 back. Of course, if you manage a large spending account, the sum could be significantly more. And it could be worth filing a ticket if that's what we need to do. So I'll let you know as I find out. And then if you've been listening to the last few episodes, our contest, our ad performance contest is in full swing. If you go to bit.ly/linkedinadscontest, you'll see the link down below in the show notes. And from now until December 11 at midnight Pacific time US, you can go on and submit a screenshot of an ad, or a campaign, or a campaign group that has really good performance. We're looking for either a ridiculously high click through rate, or a super high conversion rate, or a really low cost per click. And heck, you could submit for all three categories. The winner in each category, though, is going to win something that is absolutely amazing. And I can't tell you what it is yet, but I'm going to tell you all about it when I announced the winners. And if you're a LinkedIn advertiser, be aware that this is something that no other advertiser has, this is going to give you a serious leg up on competition. So if you're looking for ammo to bust ahead of your competition, definitely find a way to submit and win this contest. So go jump into your account now and look for those high click through rates, high conversion rates, and low costs per click. So get it submitted now and I'll help to have your prize given out by Christmas or New Year's, and I can't wait to reveal to you what you're going to be winning. So highlighting a review. Jose Bormey, who's a marketing manager, he said, "I love this podcast. There's an extremely helpful tip on the most recent podcast episode to avoid high cost per click in Q4 and instead use the budget for a big bang to kick off the new year. Cybersecurity in itself is extremely competitive, and these podcasts have helped save me a fortune. Looking forward to 2021 inbound spotlight once again." Thanks, Jose. I speak at the inbound conference every year, and I speak on advanced LinkedIn Ads. And Jose, it sounds like you've gotten to attend one or more of those presentations. So if it's going to be in person in 2021, I'd absolutely love to get to meet you in real life. So thanks so much for the kind words, and I'm so glad that we've helped you save some cash in such a competitive industry. And you, yes, you! I want to feature you. So go and leave a review. Let us know what you like, what's helped you in your jobs or ads management? I'd love to give you a shout out here. Okay, with that being said, let's hit it. Well, everyone, my name is AJ Wilcox, I run B2Linked.com. We're an ad agency that literally LinkedIn Ads is all we do. Obviously, a huge fan of LinkedIn. And I'm super excited to be with Sarah Weise today who has a great friend. And she is the author of Instabrain, which is the predominant So this is the predominant book for learning about how Gen Z interacts with social media, and how their purchasing which is obviously going to be really important for you. If it's not already, it will be in the in the coming years. Sara, like I said, longtime friend, we speak in a lot of the same conferences, and we actually got together in person before the COVID thing happened, we got a chance to do a lot of like original research, interviewing students, members of the Gen Z community live. And I am so excited to be here today. Sarah, take us away, tell us about the study, and kind of lead us into the discussion. So I think the study started because as I was going to conferences, and I was presenting about all the social media that Gen Z uses, there was always a question after the conference, like, Hey, I noticed you didn't talk about LinkedIn. Why didn't you talk about LinkedIn? And I would always say things like, Well, it's because it just didn't come up when we were talking to Gen Z. I mean, we did almost two years of research on Gen Z, before I started speaking about it, and I mean, it was all sorts of research, qualitative research and quantitative research and in home ethnography pre COVID, where we would actually go into people's homes and, and hang out with teenagers, they literally spent a year and a half hanging out with teenagers. And I mean, that was fun. And what's really interesting was that it just the topic of LinkedIn never came up. And most of these interviews were fairly open ended, like, show me how you use technology. How are you using technology to do your homework today? Walk me through it. Or like, what are you researching right now? Like, oh, you you're into guitar, and you're into rock music, like, tell me about that. And show me what you're doing and how you're doing that? Oh, you're into this video game? Tell me about it. You know, where do you go to find information on this and watching them switch between devices and between social media apps and diving deep into topics and things like that. But LinkedIn never came up. And even with the kind of older Gen Z's who are now entering the workforce, they would say things like, Oh, I'm looking for a job. And we'd be like, oh, show me how you do that. And they would go to indeed, or they would go to other places, or some of them were using LinkedIn, but it was with like, surgical precision. So they would go in there and they would be like, yep, I'm going to search for a job. Okay, I found something. Okay, I'm getting out now. And it was like, as fast as they could get out of LinkedIn, they were doing that. And so when we got together, AJ, I think I approached you because I was like, Okay, I don't get this. People keep asking about it. I need to have an answer. Let's figure out what you know what's going on. And I forgot to mention that you are the CEO of a market research company. So just to be very clear here. It was definitely you who approached me, because it never came on my radar to think, hey, I should go and do an original study. Like, definitely not in my wheelhouse. Yeah, I mean, it originated because we were doing market research on Gen Z for big companies like Google. And some, let's see some large banks and things like that. And what what happened was that we started asking the question to like, how do your new employees like find you? Where are you putting your job posts up and seeing the most Gen Z applicants and we were starting to ask those questions. And LinkedIn was just not coming up that often. And so anyway, so we started digging into it, and we started doing our own research. And what we found was really interesting, it was really surprising because what we found is that over 50% of Gen Z's and you know, across the country, they have a LinkedIn account. I mean, most colleges and universities I would say older Gen Z's like 18 and up, they have a LinkedIn account. In large part because most universities as a part of a career class or a requirement for some sort of career services, tell their students, you need to download LinkedIn, you need to create an account and so they have been asked to create account in some cases required to create a LinkedIn account, and so over 50% have a LinkedIn account, but only something like 4% were using it. I think it was 96% of the people we talked with. And these were Gen Z's across the country in the older Gen Z age range. So from about 18 years old to 24 years old. So really like in college, getting their first job, you know, applying for those entry level jobs. They were saying, This is not something we use. 10:25 What I love is, when we were in person, we were actually interviewing students on the campus of University of Utah. And I think we interviewed like 12 or 13 people before finally someone said, Oh, yeah, I have LinkedIn. And we're like, oh, good, but they show us how you use it. Yeah, yeah. They're like, Oh, I created an account one time, I can't even figure out my password. So it was like those who have it. They're certainly at least not yet not using it. Yeah. It's interesting, because this is a group that this is, first of all, this is like the largest living generation right now with a big deal type of group, especially for any sort of digital platform that wants to be, you know, a digital platform five years from now, they need to be marketing to and meeting the needs of this younger generation. And especially for for LinkedIn, which is a platform that enables people to find jobs. This is a generation that is entering the workforce now. And for some reason, there is a breakdown between what LinkedIn offers and the perception of that in the minds of Gen Z. And so I almost will say that I think that LinkedIn is failing, its Gen Z customers, because it's not giving them the information they need, maybe the tools they need, the features they need, and telling them about them and educating them on it. Because the Gen Z's we talked to they didn't even see LinkedIn as a social media platform. It was the same as indeed, it was the same exact thing as anywhere else that they would look for jobs. Yeah. And on top of that, we talked to several students who were actively looking for a job. And so we asked them, like, Hey, how are you looking? Would you consider LinkedIn? And they had this reaction to it like, Oh, well, the kinds of jobs I'm looking for, aren't there, so I'm not even gonna try. Yeah. And some of the jobs were like internships, like, oh, I need a professional internship. And we were like, Oh, my gosh, that kind of stuff is on LinkedIn. Like, of course, we couldn't say this, because we were conducting like, very third party neutral interviews. But in our minds, we were like, ooh, interesting feedback. AJ was telling himself like namaste, just keep calm. Expert in all things LinkedIn Haha! Yes. It was very sad. So yeah, tell us more about like, what are the findings? What really surprised you as you were going through this research? 12:54 I think what surprised me the most is that they don't see LinkedIn as a social media site. Like it is not in their heads anywhere close to what an Instagram is, or even a Facebook is like. They're not using Facebook, as much as say, an older demographics. But they certainly understand that Facebook is a social media platform, they're just not seeing LinkedIn as a social media platform. And they're definitely not seeing it as something that they would use. Yeah. And this is so surprising to me, because LinkedIn stopped being a job search platform to me back in like 2012. And it's been an actual social media for communicating ever since then. So it seems like LinkedIn is either not branding themselves or not reaching Gen Z with the proper messaging so they even know what the platform is and why they would want to use it. Yeah. Especially because we were asking questions too, about like, Oh, do you ever like go to the news feed? Do you ever look at articles in your field? Or do you ever communicate with people? Do you try to establish connection with that hiring manager? I mean, they tell you who the hiring manager is, who are you trying to connect with them and start conversations with them in any sort of way? And they just had no idea that that was even a possibility. 14:14 Yeah. Do you have any more insights you want to share? Or should we start going into like the prescriptive stuff like let's Let's dig into it because I think the biggest finding here is that LinkedIn is not working for this generation, so I want to hear from you AJ, LinkedIn expert, like what features are really would be really helpful to this generation who is looking for a job. And I guess I should add to that, especially now that this is we're in COVID, where months into this, it is really hard for a young person, an older Gen Z, who was just out of college to find an entry level job. Like it is extremely difficult because those entry level jobs, they're being filled by people who are overqualified for them. There. filled by people with many years of experience, who are accepting a lower salary and taking that job because unemployment is high. I mean, really, it's a really strange time because we went from this kind of the one of the largest economic booms in history to just crash bang, people are unemployed don't have jobs, like record levels of unemployment, people are just taking whatever they can find. And that made it so much harder all of a sudden to find jobs. And so I would have assumed that because of that, a young Gen Z, who is extremely digitally savvy, would be like, oh, let me hop on LinkedIn and see what there is to offer. And we're just not seeing that. Yeah. And first of all, Gen Z, I totally feel for you. I graduated in 2008. And I came out going, yes, can't wait to attack the world and go get a massive salary. And I found every single company was on hiring freeze due to the big economic downturn, 16:00 I love that you're talking to Gen Z, like they're on LinkedIn, posting this on LinkedIn. And you're, I think that's the thing. If you are watching this on LinkedIn right now, you're probably not Gen Z. Or if you are, you're one of the only ones and you should be very proud. And I absolutely understand what they're going through right now. Because it was tough. I mean, I had a year of digital marketing experience when I first graduated, and it took me three months to find a job for like, $14 an hour. And if you look at the numbers of Gen Z's right now who are moving back in with their parents, it is just off the charts, astronomical, especially, even if they're still in college, or they're, they've extended their college because they're like, I can't find a job right now so I'm going to like, you know, go for another semester and see what happens. Especially because it's, it's, um, you know, all virtual now. And I think a lot of them are also helping their parents out with their parents' jobs and things that are going on with their parents' lives, too. That's awesome. That just strikes me is actually really, really intelligent. It might be like, just necessity is the mother of invention. But I'm like, yeah, if I had a Gen Z son or daughter who was getting ready to enter the workforce, that's exactly like the hustle II'd want to see from them. Just figure out anything you can, it is a hustle. I mean, I interviewed one Gen Zer recently who said that he had, like, moved. He actually was in LA, trying to like start his career and then had moved back home to New Jersey to help out his parents power washing company, and was doing a ton of like, just manual labor power washing, because that's what his family needed. 17:40 That's fantastic. Good for those people. I know, I'm not talking to you, because you're not here, but good for you. Never gonna see that. He's not, it's not on LinkedIn. But if we posted on Instagram, he probably would. Oh, totally repost it just a little 30 second snippets. Haha! Snackable content. Haha! Yes, we'll break down only the most valuable stuff, just obviously, all of it. So we can kind of get prescriptive here, we can talk about the things that we think Gen Z could do, which obviously, we're not talking to you Gen Z, but maybe parents of Gen Z are watching. These are the things that you can help your your children understand and kind of give them a boost into the workforce. So I think the first thing that I would point out that I think is like the biggest no brainer about it, is if you have a son or daughter who is looking for a job right now in a really competitive environment, and they're not on LinkedIn, the ability to go viral on LinkedIn organically right now is insane. Um, basically what happens is anytime someone hits, like, comment, or share on your post, It then goes to a portion of their followers. And so the more people that are liking and engaging, the more people LinkedIn, start showing it to that aren't even in your network. So that's so big because being an influencer is like the be all end all for many in this generation. Like that is the goal, to get their ideas and their brand, because they really do think of themselves as an online brand to get that out into the world. Yeah, I don't think that they understand how, how easy it is to be a thought leader. And, and organically grow on LinkedIn. 19:22 And that's my point really, for for this is like, I mean, you think about the kinds of thought leaders who are bubbling to the top on LinkedIn. I mean, there's 30, I could name off who are HR experts, there are 50, who are sales experts who are just sharing stuff and trying to become well known. I don't know any Gen Zers, who are talking about the experiences they're having being authentic. I mean, for a generation who totally understands the value of becoming an influencer, the landscape here is totally ripe, for someone of this generation to come in and run it on LinkedIn. It's a lot different than the social media that they have right now because a lot of them are maybe doing YouTube videos or on Instagram, or you know even doing TikTok little 15 second TikTok things. And that's happening on video. And LinkedIn platform is just not set up for many. I mean, even doing this interview alone, we had so many tech difficulties getting Restream to work and getting like LinkedIn video platform to, to play nice with the LinkedIn live on an interview with two videos connecting, like to the point where we're just like, screw it, let's do this on a zoom video. And we'll post it afterwards, which defeats the whole purpose of LinkedIn Live. And I also think that LinkedIn needs to take some responsibility here and say, our features are not set up for the types of video sharing that Gen Z wants to do, that they are accustomed to doing on other platforms. 20:55 Oh, yeah. And the way that video works on LinkedIn, if you don't already know, you can attach video to it. So we could upload this as a native video, which I'll probably do, if it's less than 30 minutes, I think that's the limit for uploading video. For going live, they don't have a very, there's not a native ability to just like, hit it and go live, you have to use a third party, which means you're looping in all of these other technology issues, which is why we are not doing this live right now. So it adds a lot of complexity to it. Where this is a generation who is just there used to just hold up your phone, start recording yourself. We even tell when we do market research for companies, when we're doing product research for companies, we will even tell them if Gen Z can see your technology or notices your technology you're doing something wrong. Because it needs to be invisible. Like it needs to feel completely seamless, like oh, yeah, I just pushed the button. And yeah, of course that worked. So this whole let's let's connect through a third party thing. And I have to figure that out. I need an account. So I have a phone call with somebody at Restream. They don't hop on the phone. So I mean, just all of this contributes to like not a great experience for this generation. Yeah. And no knock on Restream. Because I actually love Restream. 22:17 Yeah, I think Restream is great. I think the reason that it didn't work for us is because you were trying to you've got like a computer, a DSLR hooked up, wires connecting, and there was some sort of delay with the video and audio. So I don't think this is a knock on Restream at all. I think this is a knock on LinkedIn, not natively offering the ability to just like, plug and play, like put a zoom conversation or do some sort of thing. Like I almost feel like they should have a studio in LinkedIn, LinkedIn platform, you can put two people in there and have a conversation like we're having right now and do it live? Like, why are we doing this on Zoom and Restream even just to get it into LinkedIn live, And the same solution that they could create, that's just two people talking, they could create a zoom competitor, where it's like, hey, don't even log into zoom, have all of your meetings on LinkedIn with your colleagues, like seems like a missed opportunity here. Yeah, and and that's a perfect platform to do it on. Because people are on LinkedIn for work. It's not like they're on Facebook all day like while they're working. You're trying to close down Facebook as much as you can, or, or Instagram or anything else for especially for older people. LinkedIn is the professional network that that I think most people over over 25 years or just people in general use for professional reasons. Yeah, totally. And so if you are the parent of a Gen Z, who's looking to go into the workforce, maybe you can help convince, I know, Gen Z may not want to be convinced of this. But you can help convince them like, yeah, the video stuff is harder, but because no one is doing it, there's a huge opportunity for you to cut through the clutter and become an influencer quicker, and be comfortable with text like you're comfortable sharing text and pictures as well, until video gets comfortable with where you're at. 24:10 I think one of the other findings that we saw that kind of surprised me. I mean, I guess once I thought about it, it was not surprising at all. But it was the fact that the real one of the reasons that Gen Z struggles with LinkedIn is that they go on LinkedIn. They see all these thought leaders, they see these people with great resumes because they've got 20 years in the industry or whatever it is. And they're like, Oh, my resume doesn't look like that. Like my summer internship where I got coffee for people or my like, I was a checkout person at a grocery store or I was a camp counselor. Like they're not seeing their experience as relevant to their resume. And that's in large part because of how they think of social media accounts. So they do think of it, you know that like most Gen Z's have five or six Instagram accounts. And a lot of people think that they're fake Instagrams and not real Instagrams, but they're not. They're actually, like, they're all real, legitimate accounts. They're just for different slices of their personality. And they're curating these little pockets, these little brands for themselves within each account. So if you're a Gen Xer and you're into photography, you might have a photography account, where you just follow photography and post photography, things. And you might also be into like a YouTube celebrity, so you're gonna have a fan account for them. And then you're gonna have your normal account, your school account where all your friends go, and then you're going to have like a separate account called you called your spam account, where like, it's just for your close friends, where you can be a little more real, because none of these are fully real. It's all just like little like curated slivers of their themselves. And so when you translate that to a job, they're going, Oh, I want to get a job in marketing, or that I'm wanting to get a job in HR, I want to get a job in this field, whatever the field is, and they're saying, none of my past experience tells that curated story to get me that job. And they're not seeing the connection between hey, the fact that I was a camp counselor actually taught me a lot of teamwork, because I'm planning and project management because I had to coordinate with other counselors, and I had to plan activities for the kids. And I had to do this, and I had to do that. And they taught me responsibility, and like, they're not seeing the connections between what those early jobs actually teach them, and how that is actually very relevant to a future career and an entry level position. I mean, if I see an entry level person who has had a job, as a grocery store, checkout, I know that they have good people skills, I know that they have good customer service skills, I know that they could basically make small talk with anybody, and that they listen, and they take directions and like, you know, just a lot about them based on an entry level job, even if it is not applicable to the job that they're applying for. But they don't see it that way. And they can make change. Yeah, absolutely. Mental math. Sure. Maybe. I don't know, with all the cash registers that just give it for you now. But yeah, I mean, I think that we also have to do a better job as you know, as parents and you know, as parents who are listening to this and talking to your, your Gen Z kids about, you know, when they put their resume on LinkedIn, or even if you're a school and listening to this and saying, what am I going to teach to the students in this career class, one of the things is, please list everything, it is relevant. And the fact that they can distill if they can say, I learned teamwork skills, because I did this, this and this at that job, that's even better. And also, like, I wish that they could do some sort of video resume or something instead, oh, yeah. Again, back to the video, because Gen Z's will talk about themselves and their goals and what they want to find in a job very quickly on video. Writing is another whole thing. Oh, yeah. Yeah, if you can read a resume written out of emojis, like, Gen Z is gonna do great. I don't know. Haha! 28:25 Yeah, writing skills, probably not quite there yet. But I just, I learned how to spell a word right last week. So we can still keep learning. So if you've got a Gen Zer, you can help them you can help them understand. First of all, like, hey, being an influencer is possible on LinkedIn, no one else is doing it. And here's how you have to do it on LinkedIn. So I know this is a little bit less comfortable for you in the rest of the social media use, but it's writing things and sharing things, and leveraging video that may not work quite as smoothly. If you can help them with that, that's fantastic. Transcribing the video on otter.ai and then putting it out there. Yes, and then help them understand help them think through past experience. If they look at LinkedIn and go, man, all these other people have like CEO of this and 18 years of experience in that I'm not worthy with my grocery store checkout profile, help them understand like, point towards the skills that were built, and not necessarily what they think of like, you know, oh, the job title of ice cream scooper. Sorry, I'm not worthy. You are worthy! Figure out the skills that make you interesting, especially to those who are hiring for the entry level positions. 29:38 I think also there's a lot of kind of partnerships that I see for LinkedIn, with colleges and universities, because these colleges and universities are already telling their kids, hey, you are required to or you should create a LinkedIn account and they're doing it. I mean, the numbers show that they're doing it because they're being asked to do it. So why isn't there subsequent education that says, okay, now that you have an account, this is how you do it. And it's almost on LinkedIn to like, LinkedIn should know, based on the profile, how old the person is, like the personalized profile, they should know to show a video on how to customize your profile, instead of just walking them through like, the little checklist of your 80% complete, or whatever it is like they should actually do a video series maybe on LinkedIn learning or something like that, that's free to anybody who is in a certain age range, looking for an entry level position, and has recently opened an account to follow up and actually get that going. Yeah, maybe even consider, like some kinds of suggestions where someone puts like, common titles like grocery store clerk or babysitting, it might pop up recommendations and say, other people who have this experience have phrased it like this and have used these points from skills they've learned. So you'll maybe even consider some of those. If it's not a video, maybe it's dynamic pop ups. Yeah. And also, the email is one thing we found in our in just couple years of Gen Z researches that email marketing is not dead for this generation. I mean, a lot of people think that this generation, they assume that this generation doesn't check the email, but they're actively checking email. So an email campaign from LinkedIn to people in this generation would work like where it's like, hey, you know, for the next week, every day, we're going to give you like a five minute task to do on your LinkedIn profile to make it better, that would work. And make sure to appeal to their egos, because every child of this generation has been told that they are made of gold. They are special. I love it. And I love the idea of of the college partnerships, I mean, for LinkedIn, to go into junior colleges or state universities, and work to make sure that not half of all students end up leaving with a profile, but 100% have them. They have a presence on campus, they have events they've put on together and sponsored together to help educate people like not only create an account, this is how you can use it. I mean, it's not going to reflect on next quarter's stock results. But it will like four or five years from now, I'm sure it'll do massive things. 32:29 And imagine if you started your LinkedIn profile, and like started recording the project, you worked on everything when you were 20, instead of when you started the company, when you're 30 or 35. I mean, just just imagine that like, how much more like meatier your profile would be? Yeah. And when I was searching for a job in the middle of a recession, no one was hiring. I was ashamed. And I didn't want to talk or share anything about it. Because I thought like it was a reflection on me as a failure. But especially with this generation, who has watched influencers, they understand the value of being authentic. And maybe it's offensive, but at least they see that there's value in showing your authentic self, someone who goes through and starts, like cataloging and showing what their experience is of like, hey, I'm job searching like this. Oh, man, I guarantee you would find a job so fast, when people are are seeing the hustle that you're putting in, and your control over media. 33:27 Yes, and the documentation of it and stuff like that. If I saw somebody who could really do that, and was hustling like that, I would immediately think, wow, they will hustle for my company if I hire them. Absolutely. And that's what you want. Like, that's the only thing I'm looking when I hire for someone, I just want to see drive. If you are driven and hungry, I can teach you anything about LinkedIn Ads. Generation is hungry to begin with. I mean, remember that, unlike Millennials, who grew up in a boom, this generation grew up in a recession. These are post 9/11 kids. I mean, they grew up in a time of war and recession, and they are hungry for work to begin with. I mean, these are kids that with millennials, they were like, oh, I'll take a year off and explore Europe and backpack and find myself and, and that we're not seeing that in Gen Z, like this is a generation who has entrepreneurial. 61% want to start their own businesses when they come out of high school. And it's amazing to me. In addition to that, they're valuing traditional education and they understand, okay, I want to start my own business, but I have a lot to learn to do that, which is a really interesting finding that they they're entrepreneurial, but value traditional education as well. It's not the tradition. It's not that entrepreneur, that millennial entrepreneur, like, Ah, forget this college. I'm just gonna drop out and I'm pretty smart. So I'll make it. Yeah. other entrepreneurs have done it. 33:48 Is there like something we pin on this generation that feels negative? Like do we talk about Gen Z like they are because I'm on the elder side of being a Millennial, but I very side with Millennials. And I was afraid to admit I was a millennial for years because everything I read was Millennials are lazy and entitled. And they eat too much avocado toast and they can't buy a house. Yeah, there's all of that too. And I'm with you, AJ, I'm a few years older than you. When you said when you graduated? I was like, I'm older, but yeah, I'm in this. I'm actually a microgeneration between we talked about this this microgeneration between Millennials and Gen X, where we didn't grow up with high speed internet in our homes. So we actually behave more similarly to Gen X than we do to millennials. And it's kind of an interesting microgeneration. And I wonder if there's gonna be some sort of microgeneration here now, that's like the COVID generation or something like that. I mean, they call that micro-generation the Oregon Trail generation because they're the kids that like, grew up with the big floppy disks where you're like sharing a computer at school with like three or four other kids and you're like walking across the country and dying of dysentery, shooting squirrels, you know, I ran out of ammo again. No, somebody stole my horse! My oxen. Haha! I loved Oregon Trail. 36:16 So I mean, I wonder if there's going to be a similar microgeneration here of like the kids who are the young adults who were trying to find a job during COVID. Yeah. Oh, I totally think there will be. I am so glad, just as an aside, I'm so glad that I was alive for COVID. Because if you would have told me like 10 years later, or 10 years earlier, like there's this thing that we live through, and the whole world stopped, and everyone started wearing masks like, I would not believe you. So I'm glad we experienced this. And for people to have their formative years during it. I can't even imagine what that's like. Yeah, I'm interested in too. And how this is affecting Gen alpha, which are the kids who are under 13, who today are for the first time like I'm sorry, you can't be in school. 37:05 Yeah, you can't be in school, you have to homeschool and we don't have a device for you, but figure it out kids. And depending on what here you are as an alpha, like, I've got four alphas in my house. And there's a whole year that they pretty much took off of school. Like it wasn't the same curriculum. Like, are we going to have a whole generation where this year knows nothing about geography? I think? Yeah, I absolutely think we will. I mean, that happened to my daughter at the end of last year, when we started homeschooling, I realized in the summer, because we did it like a math assessment for her like, Oh, these are the things you should have learned in third grade. And she missed math, basically, all the things that you learned at the end of third grade math, she just was really weak on them. And I was like I was there I was homeschooling you. I know you did this, I know you learn how to convert fractions. And yet, and yet she was really weak in it. And I think that there's gonna be a really big gap to between kids who were at a public school, where they were had to be home for a whole year, and the kids who started back this year, in private school, like there's gonna be a huge gap in terms of the kids who don't have just missed a whole longer period of time than the kids who were in private schools and able to go back in person because they were small class sizes. Oh, incredible. This will be so much fun to watch. I know we need to wrap up. We're out of time. But thank you so much for getting together, cooperating on the study together. This is amazing. I will say all the research we'll post a link to it, but it is posted on the Bixa Research blog. So if you want to see the the findings of the research, the major findings, it's all written out and handed like in a story. Yes. With bullet point findings so that you can actually go ahead and get some of this data and use it. And you know, if you're creating your own products, too, I mean, even if you're in marketing somewhere else, it's super helpful to understand what we're critiquing LinkedIn for here related to Gen Z. And I bet there are some similarities with your company, too. Oh, yeah. And if you're listening to this on the LinkedIn Ads Show podcast, we'll put it in the show notes below, taking you right to bixaresearch.com. So Sarah, thank you so much for doing this. This is amazing. I am in awe of information that you so effortlessly throw out there every time we talk. 39:28 Oh, and let me give you a freebie too! Okay, so if you would like a free chapter of Insta brain, you can go to bixaresearch.com. It'll be in the show notes or in the comments if this is being posted to LinkedIn bixaresearch.com/freechapter. And you'll get a free chapter of Instabrain, the new rules to marketing to Gen Z and you'll also get a PDF of the like top ways we do research for Gen Z. So if you're thinking about really getting to know this audience, which you should be because it is the last just living generation right now and they're entering the workforce and they contribute to $655 billion a year in purchase power. So you should be thinking about them as your customers, as your employees, everywhere. They will make you not go out of business! So, you know, when you are ready to do research, this PDF will tell you like the techniques that are really working for them right now. 40:24 Awesome. Thanks so much for running the study. This information was incredible. I know everyone listening you're gonna love the article. It the in depth research. The data behind it, Sarah was the mastermind and I was merely a contributor. Oh, he's not getting and giving himself enough credit for that. I never do. Also, thanks so much, Sarah. And thanks for everyone for watching slash listening. Oh, are you a waiver? I recently read a study on people who waive versus not waive on zoom calls at the end. Really? So what's the difference? Like what does it mean something about your personality? Yeah, it's like people, some people are just totally over zoom. And they're like goodbye. Yeah, so yeah, that was your little easter egg, then do your podcast random. Waiting bowl. Do you wave or do you not, you'll notice it about yourself next time you're on zoom. So there you have it. I hope you enjoyed our banter on the findings from this research. I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around. Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 41:45 All right. So here's some great resources. First of all, the link to the contest, bit.lylinkedinadscontest. All in lowercase. That's where you can go and submit to hopefully win this contest. Again, so excited to tell you about what you're going to win The article that LinkedIn published from Gyanda there about how it's fixing the ads over reporting, the links right down there in the show notes, you can go and read that for yourself. And then of course, the actual write up all the original research, you can find on bixaresearch.com. The link right to that blog post is down below as well. If you're just getting started on LinkedIn ads, or you have a colleague or someone who is check out our ads course on LinkedIn Learning the links right down below for that. And it is by far the cheapest and the most complete training on LinkedIn Ads that there is out there at the moment. So check it out. super inexpensive, again, a lot cheaper than hiring me to come and train your team. Definitely hit subscribe on your podcast player right now. Please give us a rating and I'm hoping you'll give us five stars. But if not tell us why. And then definitely leave a review. I'd love to give you a shout out here. With any questions, any feedback, any thoughts, topics, and anything you want to discuss. Hit us up at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Enter the Contest! bit.ly/linkedinadscontest Download the B2Linked Onboarding Checklist: https://b2linked.com/checklist New Company Page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/setup/new/ Episode 02 - Targeting Strategies Episode 10 - Offers that Convert Episode 17 - Lead Gen Form Ads Episode 38 - LinkedIn Insight Tag LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Show Transcript: Looking to get started with LinkedIn Ads, but just don't know where to start? I got you. This is the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there, LinkedIn Ads fanatics. Every new ad channel I dive into feels super daunting to me. There's so much familiar, but there's so many other things that are proprietary to just that platform. And it brings me so much anxiety. So when I started advertising on LinkedIn back in, like 2011, I did about everything wrong. And I wasted a bunch of time and a bunch of money. And I wanted to give you guys the resource that I wish I had. When we bring on a new client, we give them our eight point checklist that contains everything that we need in order to get started advertising. On this episode, I'm going to walk you through that checklist, along with full explanations of the what and why for each of them. In the news, our high performing ads contest is totally in full swing, you guys and gals have some amazing campaigns and results. So please keep the entries coming. This is incredible. Of course, the link to enter with all the rules is down in the show notes, you can just click that link, but it's bit.li/linkedInadscontest. For those of you who don't know, here's the contest. From now until December 11, 2020 at midnight Pacific time, you can go on and submit a screenshot of an ad, campaign, or a campaign group even that has really good performance. We're looking for either really high click through rates, or conversion rates, or a really low cost per click. The winner in each category will receive something amazing. And if you're a LinkedIn advertiser, I know you're going to find this to be fascinating, but I just can't tell you what it is yet. I do promise that it's going to be something that no other advertiser has, you'll be totally unique. And you'll be armed with something that you know your competitors don't have. So go right now, I know you're probably on a run, at the gym, in the car, but go right now. Pull over if you need to and go and start checking out your account and see if you have some ridiculously high click through rates, high conversion rates, or low cost per click. Submit now and I hope to have you your gift by Christmas or New Year's, and I just can't wait to reveal what you'll be winning. For our reviews highlight. Lindsey Danielle says, "AJ is a LinkedIn ads wizard. The most informative and actionable digital ads podcast for those looking to advance their expertise, skill set, and test new strategies on the platform. AJ is down to earth, conversational, and truly cares about helping you improve your LinkedIn Ads. He tells you how it is in a digestible fashion. So you leave with truly actionable insights to optimize your campaigns. Highly recommend I wish I had started listening sooner." Lindsay Danielle, thanks so much for the awesome review and the kind words, I do wish you'd started listening earlier too. But now you've got a whole ton of episodes to binge. You're welcome. 3:03 And to everyone else. You! Yes, you. I want to feature you here. So leave a review for the podcast on any podcast reviewer thing that you find. And I would love to give you a shout out. All right. With that being said, let's hit it. 3:17 Account Now to start a LinkedIn Ads account. The first thing you're going to need is an account. It sounds pretty obvious here. But you may already have an account out there that you need to get access to. Or you might have to create one from scratch. So here's how that works. If you already have an account, you'll just need to get access from someone who's an admin on the account. And if that person has what are called account manager permissions, they can add you by going to the gear icon in the upper right hand corner of campaign manager. They click on manage access, then edit, then add user to account. Then type in your name, select your level of access, and then hit save changes. And it's that simple. And now you'll have access to the account. For this person to grant you access, you don't need to be connected to that person. And there are five kinds of access that you can give someone. The first is account manager. And this is full administrative access, where you can create, edit pretty much anything in the account. That means campaign groups, campaigns, and ads, along with the added bonus here that you can either add or remove or change rights for anyone else on the account. The next is called campaign manager access. And this person, you're an editor basically, you can create and edit pretty much everything in the account, except you can't do anything with the other users on the account, so you can't add or remove someone or change their rights. The next is called a creative manager. and creative managers can't edit or change anything to deal with a campaign, but they can create new ads. So this might be what you want to give someone who's not actively managing the ads, but maybe they're launching and creating new creative for you. The next is viewer. And a viewer can see everything in the account. They can see the targeting, bidding, the ads, even the performance metrics, but they just can't make any changes. Even something as simple as hitting pause on a campaign, a viewer can't do. And the fifth and final level here is basically an account manager, it's a full admin. But one admin of an account is the billing admin. Here, you have all the same rights as a full account manager, you can edit, change, view, whatever you need to, but you also get the one added privilege of updating or changing the payment details in the account. And usually, that just means the credit card. What's interesting here with the billing is that if you change the credit card at all in the account, if you add a new one, replace it, or switch who the billing admin is, instantly your campaigns all shut off, and it goes down like there's no payment. So anytime you make a change like this, be ready for it. And you've got to go and pop that new credit card right back in there. So that's if you already have an account. But what if you don't have one already? Well, you'll want to go to linkedin.com/ads. This is the easiest way I found to get there, you click on the button that says create ads, and then you follow the prompts to create the account. And then you can follow the instructions we talked about before for granting access to others. You can also access your campaign manager by just going to linkedin.com. and look in the upper right hand corner on desktop. Sometimes you'll see an icon that says advertise. And sometimes you just click on the I think it's the nine dots button that shows all the stuff to deal with work and advertise may be in there. Once you've got your account, and you get to the dashboard. My recommendation is to bookmark that page and stick it right in like your browser toolbar. So it's easy to access. Because there's nothing worse than coming in and doing exactly the same three clicks a whole bunch of typing to get there, when you should just be one click away. 7:02 Company Page Alright, the next thing that you need is when you create an ads account, it'll ask you which company page you can attach your ads to. And this is because sponsored content ads, which is the halo ad format, as I call it, it's where most people should start, those ads live on the company page. And that means that if you don't have a company page, you can still advertise, but you'll only be able to use the text ads and sponsored messaging ad formats. And I believe you might still be able to run dynamic ads, the ones that are called spotlight ads, but definitely not follower ads. Don't quote me on that, though. But because sponsored content ads are so good. Of course, I'm assuming here that you'll want to use them. So that means you'll either need to create a company page or get access from someone if you already have one set up and you just need it. So creating a new company page, the link is down below in the show notes. But it's linkedin.com/company/setup/new. And you just go through and answer a few questions. And sure enough, you'll have a company page. But what if you already have one, but you just need access. So for this one, you do need to be connected to this person on LinkedIn in order to pass access. So make sure you go and connect with that person first, then they're going to actually navigate to the company page. And the easiest way if you don't bookmark this is go and search for the company name in LinkedIn. And it'll pop up as a suggestion. Or if there's too many like it, then you may need to go ahead and run the search, maybe even select it down to just searching by companies, but then you'll usually be able to find it. Then this person's going to click on admin tools, and then manage admins, and then search for your name there underneath the section of designated admins, you just start typing their name, and it should pop right up. If you just recently connected, you might need to refresh this page in order for you to show up. Now I am telling you to get added as a page admin and your boss or client might be uncomfortable granting you a full admin access here, but I'm going to explain why you actually need this. You can still create ads with a lesser right. And that right is called sponsored content posters. But once you create an ad and you make it active, it's going to go into a review queue. And as soon as it hits the review queue, you can't do anything to pause, activate, anything like that. Basically, the only thing you can do is pause the campaign it's in. It's basically wanting to sit there until LinkedIn approves it. And then you can do something with it. And of course, currently, there's no notification when an ad actually gets approved. And so you might be sitting there every half hour hitting refresh, trying to catch this thing. A couple times I've hit publish on an ad and then went, oh crap, there's a spelling error in there, and I've got to stop it. And if you're just a sponsored content poster, then you can't do anything about that that thing is going and it gonna spend some money unless you catch it real fast. There's a little known trick, though that we use. If you're an actual page admin, you can actually go in and delete the ad. And when you delete the ad from the company page, it totally pulls the rug out from underneath that ad in campaign manager, it'll just say ad deleted. And you don't have to worry about it actually going live. To do this little trick. As a page admin, you'll go to your company page, and you'll scroll down to the section called updates. And it'll say filter by, and it defaults to filter by page updates. But if you click that, you can tell it to do direct sponsored content. And then that will show you all of your ads that are not visible to the company page followers. When you find the offending ad, you can click the three little dots in the upper right, and then just click delete update, and then it's gone. And you can go and fix your mistake and relaunch. So I get asked all the time about the difference between direct sponsored content, and a sponsor company page post. I think I can illustrate the difference here by telling you a story about when sponsored content very first came out. I was running an account with 600 campaigns. And I'm sure you all know my strategy, we always launch an AB test in every campaign. So it meant I had to launch 1200 sponsored content, one at a time, it was terrible. And I did it in the middle of the night, because what would happen is when you create a sponsored content, at least back then, you were publishing it as an organic page post and sponsoring it at the same time. And so we had a bunch of company page followers, who if they were following us, they might be really annoyed by watching 1200, nearly identical ads come across their screen. So that's why I did it in the middle of the night. And I just pleaded with LinkedIn, please, please, please let us do the equivalent of what people on Facebook had as dark posts. And this is where you get to create ads that your company page followers don't get to see. And then within a year, they released direct sponsored content. And I can't tell you how excited I was for this. I was actually the first person to ever use the direct sponsored content because I was willing to stay late on a Friday night, because I've been waiting for this thing for so long. So what they are, they're sponsored content ads that are hidden from your company page followers, nothing more, nothing less. So don't overcomplicate what direct sponsored content is just because the name direct sponsored content is way too complicated. Alright, so let's say that you can't get rights to your company page. But you still really want to run sponsored content ads? Well, one thing you can do, you don't even need any sort of access to the company page for this, you can sponsor existing company page content. On Facebook, we call this boosting posts. And as an aside here on Facebook boosting posts is fantastic. What you can do is you can take the ad ID of an organic post that already has some social proof, some likes and comments. And then you can go and create an ad out of it with a unique tracking URL. And it keeps all the social proof. So really, you get the best of both worlds, you have your social proof. Plus, you have the ability to track all the way down to the individual ad level. It's amazing. On LinkedIn, it's a little bit tougher though, because when you go to create an ad, it always starts with zero. On LinkedIn, it's a little bit different and you really have to weigh your pros and cons here. You can create a direct sponsored content post with its own unique tracking URL. And this will allow you to do tracking all the way down to the ad level, which is amazing. But of course, it starts with zero social proof, no likes no comments, it looks brand spanking new. On the other hand, you can go and boost a company page post. And maybe it's already got some likes and comments from just running organically on the company page. But then you can't customize the URL. And so once those leads get into your CRM, you actually can't tell whether that person came from an ad, or from your company page followers or maybe even virally. So you get to make the choice between having a good tracking URL for proper attribution, or having social proof that you know is going to help boost the ad a little bit. Me personally, I go with the tracking URL, proper tracking and attribution is paramount to us showing our value to our clients. And so we give up that social proof. But man, I hope LinkedIn at some point rolls out the same kind of thing that advertisers get on Facebook. And every so often will talk to a client who has a company page, but the person who created it is no longer with the company or they're not on good terms and they can't get access. If this is the case for you. You can just go right to LinkedIn support, you let them know, they'll basically email you on your company email so they can tell that you actually do work there, and then they'll give you access. Here's a quick sponsor break and then we'll dive into the rest of what you need to do in order to get your account off the ground. 14:58 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com. The LinkedIn Ads experts. 15:08 If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you than B2Linked is the agency you want to work with. We've spent over $130 million on LinkedIn Ads, and no one outperforms us on getting you the lowest cost per lead. We're official LinkedIn partners and you'll only deal with a LinkedIn ads expert from day one. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com, to chat about your campaigns. And we'd love to work with you. All right, jumping right back into the other pieces that you need to actually launch your LinkedIn Ads. And some of these things are going to be optional, but I'm going to dictate to you based on an optimal launch, and recommend that you do all these things. 15:45 Tags So once you have an ads account, the first thing that you should do is go and get your LinkedIn insight tag from the account and get it installed on every page of your website. Go back and listen to Episode 38 to go into a lot more detail on this tag, what it does, and what benefit it brings. Audiences Then, as soon as you have this tag on your website, you can go into account assets matched audiences, and then set up a retargeting audience so it's building. Because even if you're not going to want to immediately run retargeting, you really are going to want to have an audience when you do want to. One note here, Facebook builds audiences retroactively. So you can install the pixel today and then up to 30 days later, you can go and set up an audience and Facebook will remember who visited the page in the last 30 days and add them to that audience. LinkedIn does not do this. LinkedIn is only going to match audiences once the insight tag is there. And you've set up a rule you've set up a retargeting audience, so it can start collecting. So get that early, get it now. The next thing is you're going to want to figure out how you're going to track your conversions. And there are really three different ways to do this. If you have the insight tag installed, you can set up conversion tracking, so that when someone lands on your thank you page, it will fire a conversion there. And this is by far my favorite way. But if you don't have a thank you page, and you want to track an event, like a button click, you can still do that, it requires someone with some JavaScript prowess. But when you go to set up a conversion, you can select it as an event conversion. And then follow the instructions to get that affixed to a button or whatever. But if you don't want to send the traffic to your own website, maybe you don't have a good landing page for this or maybe your website isn't great for mobile traffic and you know a lot is going to come from LinkedIn, you can use LinkedIn lead generation forms. And that's right within the ad itself. When someone interacts with it, a form appears with pretty much everything that LinkedIn knows about them auto filled prefilled. And all they have to do is just hit submit, which is pretty awesome. But of course, you'll want to make sure you set up an integration with your CRM, or marketing automation platform. So those leads go immediately into a system and you can take action on them quickly. Check out Episode 17, where we go really deep into the use of lead generation forms. But, if your CRM or marketing automation system isn't HubSpot, Eloqua, Marketo, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, then your lifesaver is going to be the zapier.com $20 per month plan, because it can handle pretty reliably leads coming from LinkedIn and pushing them into about any system that you've got. The next thing you want to do is have a good idea of who your ideal target audience is. Because if you don't know that, you're going to be a little bit aimless, as you go through all the targeting options and wonder what to choose. The way I like to do this is I'll go and pull up like five to 10 LinkedIn profiles for my ideal customers. And maybe I'll go pull up three to five ideal company pages. And I'm going to look for commonalities like similar titles, or skills, groups. And then on the company page, I'm going to look for similar company sizes or similar industries. And this is going to help me define my targeting. When you actually go to start building this targeting, go back and listen to Episode Two on our B2Linked targeting strategies, as it's pure gold, if I do say so myself. Imagery/Video And of course, to create an ad, you'll have to have some imagery, or maybe you're running video ads, so you'll need that video asset. If it's imagery, you want to make sure you've got 1200 pixels wide by 627 tall and stay away from the blue colors. If you look at the opposite of blue on the color wheel, it's orange, so stick to oranges, greens, reds, anything that is going to make your ad stand out. And if you're running video, make sure you use subtitles because the vast majority of people who see the ad and watch it are going to watch it with the sound off. And please do keep it short. If the ads too long, no one will stick around to the end. It sure doesn't hurt to have an idea of what you might share in an ad what you might say. And one of the next few episodes that we come out with Here is going to be an episode on how to write the perfect ad. So listen for that for sure, but have in mind something that maybe some points that you want to write. And that's going to make your job a lot easier when you actually go to stick that image on there that you already have, and write some ad copy. 20:15 Your Offer But now we go on to by far the most important choice that you'll make in advertising on LinkedIn. And this is your offer, your call to action, what your ads are actually going to ask someone to do. Go back and listen to Episode 10 on offers and calls to action that work on LinkedIn. This is one of our most if not the most downloaded episode. It's a classic and it hasn't aged a bit. GA & Other Analytics/Tech Tags Then there's some additional tech that you're probably going to want to have installed on your site to make the best use of this traffic. So the first is Google Analytics or some kind of analytics package. And analytics package is so nice because it can tell you so much more about your ads, then you can learn by just looking at the initial stats. I would also suggest installing the Facebook custom audiences retargeting tag, the Google remarketing tag. And if you're feeling really ambitious, check out things like Korra and Twitter for retargeting, they can be quite good as well. I recently heard about Microsoft Clarities product from Mark Gustafson of 900kings.com, so Mark, thanks for the tip. And that one's really cool. It's like a Microsoft addition to your Google Analytics. And it's got some really cool data it shows. And of course, it's free, so check that one out. And of course, for installing all these tags, you can have your web developer, do them all one by one, or you can install a tag manager like Adobe or Google Tag Manager. And that'll give you one web interface where you can just paste all of these tags, and then publish them right to the website. I love tag managers. Lists And one of the most amazing things about LinkedIn ads platform is the lists upload, what they call matched audiences. And this is where you can upload lists of either company names or individuals that you either want to target or exclude. Now, right at the beginning of a campaign, the first thing that you want to do is go and get those lists created and uploaded. Because LinkedIn says they take 24 to 48 hours, but realistically, a lot of them take 48 to 72 hours. So if you want to launch quickly, get those lists uploaded ASAP, so that by the time they're done finishing baking, then your ads can launch. Credit Card If it's a brand new account, you'll see a nag bar at the top of every screen that lets you know that your credit card isn't entered and so you won't be able to advertise yet. So you'll first want to go in, just follow the navbar or go into the gear and then billing center and just follow the instructions there. But then in order for your ads to actually go live, you have to have a campaign where you've fully activated, that means the credit cards in, you've gone through the launch process, it shows you a recap of the of the whole campaign, you approve it. And then it shows a little rocket ship launching. As part of that process, you need to create an ad and you actually submit the ad to go live. And then we found that most ads take an average of three to six hours for approval from LinkedIn. So you may hit launch, but you might not see any stats, it might not actually be running for, you know, three to six hours, maybe even up to 24 hours. And then of course, once your ads are launched, go listen to our other episodes, binge them over a weekend if you need to. But of course all the other episodes, we're teaching you how to actually set your bids and budgets, how to run AB tests, and how to think about targeting and optimizations. All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around. 23:52 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. Resources I mentioned at the beginning of the episode that B2Linked sends out a LinkedIn startup checklist to our clients. We actually put together a pretty PDF of this. And so here in the shownotes, if you scroll down, you can click on B2Linked.com/checklist and you can download the free checklist there. Also in the show notes, you'll see the link there for how to create a new company page, along with several of the other episodes that I mentioned here as being ancillary. But I really want to point out the contest here, please go click on the link for the LinkedIn ads contest and submit screenshots of your best performing ads or campaigns. We've got some great entries so far, but you can still win. And I've got awesome things to share with you. And I just can't tell you about them yet. But I'm so excited. I'm brimming. And of course, if you are just getting started with LinkedIn ads, go check out the course that I did with LinkedIn learning and the links right there in the show notes. It's ultra cheap. It's one of the best courses out there. You just can't go wrong. And if you've liked what you've heard today, click on the subscribe button on your podcast player and make sure that you're hearing all of the new episodes because we've got some killer episodes coming up for you and I couldn't be more excited about it. And if you found value, please do rate and review the podcast. If you leave a review, I'll totally shout you out here. And then of course, with any ideas or questions, reach out to us at Podcast@ B2linked.com. And we'd love to hear from you. We always love feedback from our loyal listeners. All right, with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Episode 02 - Targeting Strategies Episode 06 - Bidding Episode 26 - Why so expensive? Episode 29 - Saturation Episode 32 - Covid Episode 37 - Seasonality LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Show Transcript: You're watching as your costs keep climbing and climbing on LinkedIn Ads. And you're like, "Oh, come on!". I'm going to tell you how to combat it and even reverse it. This is the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. So you're just advertising along minding your own business. And every month, you're watching your efficiency decrease. You hate reporting to your boss, or your client that your performance is just declining month over month. The platform is definitely going to keep getting more and more competitive, so you've got to do something totally different to get off of that train of just declining performance. But there is hope. There are things that you can do to fight that drag on your performance and even reverse it. So that's what we'll be covering today. In the news, there are a lot of changes afoot, and I'm super excited. Eliot Shiner from Bind Media. He tagged me on LinkedIn, about LinkedIn releasing bulk tools, which is super cool. In the post that he shared, he was looking at an account that had these bulk ads features. And certainly not everyone has it yet. This is probably very early in the rollout. But watch for it, he said that you can do applying saved audiences across multiple campaigns. So that's pretty cool. You can change campaign bids and budgets in bulk. You can download audience strings to build new audience combinations. And the last thing he shouted out was you can adjust campaign settings such as audience expansion or the audience network. How cool would that be to be able to go into an account and just bulk unassign audience expansion from every campaign and just instantly fix an account. Elliott, thanks so much for tagging me in that one. Another really cool improvement was brought to my attention by David Rosendahl from Southern California. And, David, I know you're a listener. So thanks so much for bringing this to my attention. He found out that LinkedIn rolled out and a way message that you can set in your messaging on the app. And this is only available to premium users on LinkedIn, so you got to be paying for a profile to get this. And we definitely see more and more features rolling out like this. And they're trying to dangle as bait to get someone to upgrade their profile. And of course, LinkedIn had to roll this out a week after I got back from vacation, so I didn't even get a chance to use it. I have an out of office set on my email when I'm gone. But people on LinkedIn, just think I'm a jerk that doesn't respond from what I can tell everyone with premium has this option in their app. So check it out and see, I can't wait to go on vacation again and set an out of office on my LinkedIn messaging as well. This week, LinkedIn also released something really freaking cool. This is a feature that I've just been calling the ABM dashboard. But LinkedIn actually released this to a portion of accounts. And they're calling it the company engagement report. Most don't have it yet. But it's like most rollouts, where it's probably rolling out weekly, for a quarter or a sixth of the population every week. And we checked a bunch of our accounts that are running ABM, and we only had two accounts so far that had access to this. And you can read the official news about this release by just checking in the show notes down below, I have the link to the official release. But I had to hunt around a little bit to see if I even had it in my accounts. So here's what you do. Inside of campaign manager, you go to account assets, and then matched audiences. And then from your list of matched audiences, any of your company match lists that have a hyperlink on them, click on it. If you don't have access to this yet, it will just go into like an edit of the list itself. But if you do have it, it'll take you right to the company engagement report. And this is so cool. What it shows is all of the companies who've engaged with your ads, they give a basic engagement level. So like from low to very high or unavailable if that account hasn't interacted with you at all. There's a column for the number of members that were targeted by your ads who belong to that company, a column for the number of campaigns, I'm guessing the number of campaigns that would target someone from one of these organizations, the impressions, the ad engagements, the organic engagement, and the website visits that resulted from each of these companies that you're going after in your ABM list, the time range is stuck at the last 90 days. What I love is there is a company name search field. So let's say that you have thousands of people on your ABM lists, and you're curious just to see one like, hey, I want to see if JP Morgan visited our website or interacted with our ads. You could type in JP and then it automatically filters everything for you. You can also change the columns. So by default, it's going to drop you into engagement. But you can change that to details. And then it gives you basically a rundown of each of these accounts. It'll tell you their name, what industry they're part of, what company size they are, and the date that they were added to this list. The report is paginated. And it looks like about 50 will fit on each page. So I'm curious if any of you have access to this. And let's say you've uploaded a list that hits their maximum of 300,000 company names. If you have 50 at a time, are you going to have pagination out to, you know, the hundreds, it'll be interesting to see if they have a limit on the number of companies they can give you feedback for. And Jay, one of the product managers at LinkedIn who actually was responsible for this rollout, he mentioned to me in a comment that much of this was driven by the insight tag. So this is really cool to see the combination of metrics that LinkedIn can see from campaigns you're actively running, and accounts that they recognize how they're interacting on your website. So if you don't have this yet, watch for it over the next, let's say four to six weeks until all of us have it. And you can get ready for this by uploading an ABM list whether or not you plan on advertising to them, because I think there's still going to be value here organically. And then make sure that the LinkedIn insight tag is on your site. 6:03 In personal news, I'm doing a deep reorganization of my office right now, you guys all hear the stuff that comes out of my brain, but you hear it after I've spent three plus hours organizing it. So imagine how cluttered it is up there. My office organization mirrors the organization of my mind, I feel like the classic mad scientist, but instead of beakers all over my laboratory, I have 113 browser tabs open in Chrome and piles of stuff in my office that I keep below the sight line of my webcam. Okay, so AJ is telling you something about his organization? Why does that matter? Well, I'm redesigning my office to be a studio. And the reason why we have a YouTube channel, and I've put out some videos that I'm really proud of. But to create those videos, takes literally hundreds of hours. I'm a little bit of a perfectionist, and I hate putting something out there that I don't love, and doesn't have all the most amazing animations. When I go to create a video. The problem is I'm spending so many hours setting up cameras and setting up lighting equipment, and trying to make sure everything's perfect that I run out of time, and I can't create the content. So the thought here is that I'm going to be able to create video content very quickly, I have the lighting and camera set up in my office as a studio. And you guys, there is so much that I'm excited to share with you. But because it takes so long to create video content I haven't been able to before. But I'm hoping now even if it's like quick three or four minute YouTube videos where I show you something, I just want to get it out. And stay tuned, we'll even try an episode or two of the LinkedIn ads show as a video podcast to see how that works. 7:40 Contest! And like we talked about last week, we're running a contest. And thanks everyone who made suggestions about the kind of contest, you guys gave us some great ideas. Now this contest is live as of the release of this episode. So go and do this today. Scroll down to the show notes. Or if you don't have show notes on your podcast player, you can just go to the URL bit.ly/linkedInadscontest, all lowercase. Okay, so I've told you how to get in. But I didn't tell you what the contest is all about. So here's the contest for now, when you're listening to this, hopefully it's not too much later for now until December 11, 2020 at midnight, Pacific time. And now I made it myself, I put it in Pacific time. But because we're LinkedIn advertisers, I totally should have made it in the UTC timezone. So this is an ad performance contest, you can go on and submit a screenshot of an ad, a campaign, or a campaign group that has particularly great performance. We're looking for either a ridiculously high click through rate, or a crazy low cost per click, or a mammoth conversion rate, you can submit multiple times. So if you have multiple clients you want to submit for, go for it. And the winner in each category will win something truly amazing. If you're a LinkedIn advertiser, I know you're gonna find this fascinating. I can't tell you what it is just yet. I'm not going to spoil the surprise. But I can promise you, it's something that no other advertiser has, you'll be armed with something that your competitors do not have, you'll have a major leg up on them. Okay, that's all the hints I'm going to give. So get it on your to do list or your calendar or whatever it's going to take to do this, but go and jump into your account or accounts and look for those high click through rates, high conversion rates, or low cost per click. So submit that now. And then I will have your gift to you before Christmas or New Year's this year. Guys, I'm so excited about this, but I'm going to shut up about it now. The last little piece of news here. There are more changes in campaign manager coming and you probably don't have them already. But watch for them in the coming weeks or months. There's functionality coming like being able to share audiences between accounts, which is really cool. Especially for those large companies who have multiple ad accounts running, maybe different business units within. And a huge thanks to Mark Gustafson from 900Kings.com for pointing that one out. And a huge thank you to Dominik Hemeli for this review, he left on the podcast, he says, "Just listened to the episode about LinkedIn campaign goals and I think I learned more about LinkedIn advertisement listening to that compared to any conference or workshop in all of 2020. Simply amazing, and I will test all of the recommended hacks, keep it up and stay safe -DOM. That's what we're going for Dominic, all value and no fluff. So thanks so much for getting value out of it and continuing to be a listener, keep the reviews coming, guys, I would love to feature you. Okay, with that being said, let's hit it. 10:44 Costs are Rising on LinkedIn Ads Costs are rising on LinkedIn Ads. And from the very beginning back in 2007, they started really high, they've always been high, but they're going to keep getting higher. This is the nature of all ad platforms. They're all based on competition. And at the beginning, when not everyone has adopted them, yet, competition is going to be lower. Like when I started advertising on Google, the floor bid was five cents. And that dates me a little bit. But what happened is people got on and tried it, the early adopters, and it worked so well and it produced a return on their investment. So they went and told their friends, and then they all tried it. And then as the cycle happens, adoption continues to roll out until prices go up. And those prices will rise until the platform starts pricing some people out of the market. Because I guarantee you, there are some law firms out there who are saying, Man, I'm just getting started on Google and I have to pay $320 for a click, ah, I'm gonna go and advertise elsewhere. With LinkedIn specifically, it's always been a platform for the sophisticated advertiser. Costs per click are high, they started high. And so marketers who didn't have visibility into the actual lead quality, the marketing qualified lead stage, the sales qualified lead stage, or whatever you call it, they see that their costs per lead are really high compared to other channels and then they quit. But sophisticated marketers, on the other hand, I'm guessing everyone listening here is one of these, you're not just watching your cost per lead, but you understand that there is value in targeting only the most highly qualified prospects. And because the quality of the prospect on LinkedIn is so much higher than other channels, you guys find that it's worth it to continue advertising, and then even scale up those efforts even if at the very top engagement level, it looks expensive. Back in 2011, when I was brand new to LinkedIn Ads, the majority of marketers didn't rely on closing the loop with their CRM, we didn't even have conversion tracking back then it was going to take a lot of years before we got that, but then synching with your CRM, this was technical, and in a lot of cases, it was prohibitively expensive. But now in 2020, it's really rare to come across a B2B marketer who isn't at least moderately armed with a tech stack and an understanding of lead quality. Marketers are getting more sophisticated, we're catching up, which is amazing. And more people coming to the platform to advertise, it introduces additional competition. But this competition can be balanced out, as long as more LinkedIn members come and spend more time on the platform and that creates new inventory, it tends to balance out. And that's really how it was from like 2014 to 2018, cost per click on the platform stayed about the same that whole time. But currently, we're seeing that for most audiences. advertiser demand is outpacing the growth of LinkedIn audience and their usage. And just an idea here, maybe it's because of all the mass organic outreach spam, it's making people not want to spend as much time on LinkedIn. If you're doing it, please stop, it's hurting everyone. If you haven't listened to Episode 26, on why LinkedIn Ads are so expensive, make that a high priority. Get that into your "to listen" list. So let's say that you're advertising on LinkedIn, minding your own business, and you start to notice your costs are continuing to rise. There could be a lot of reasons for this. Of course, we've spent a lot of time talking about competition, it could be competition on the platform. And you have to picture this competition as a force like inflation is. It's going to keep going steadily, and you just have to plan ahead for it. And here in the US, we plan on inflation being a little over 3% per year in the US dollar. So what that means is if you have money today, and you hide it in your safe or in your mattress, that money is going to be worth 3% less every single year because of inflation. It's the same principle with advertising. If you keep doing the same thing that you've always done, it'll perform progressively worse as time goes on. But it might not all be about competition, there could be an element of saturation in there. Saturation is when your audience has already seen your ads or your offers before and so now they're less likely to click on it. Check out Episode 29, where we went way deep into saturation and how to stop it. It could also be a lack of novelty, I guarantee the first person to ever advertise a free consultation was probably inundated with cheap leads. But after that caught on and everyone started offering a free consultation, it really lost its novelty. And now you just assume that everyone has a free consultation. So you stop acting on ads where that's the call to action. So this just goes to show if you're still using the exact same tactics, or offers or approach to ad creative that you were using last year, or even the year before, that could be the reason of rising costs and dropping performance. 15:55 And that dovetails nicely here into the next one, which is you're probably getting lower performance, because you're getting lower click through rates. For whatever reason, people are losing interest in your ads. What happens is they stop clicking on your ads or engaging with them. So your click through rate drops a little bit. And then LinkedIn sees that people are less interested and they then award you a lower relevancy score. So now you have a worse relevancy score, which means every auction for an impression that you go to approach, you're at a disadvantage now. With the same bids, you're going to win fewer auctions, so you'll see less traffic, and you'll also pay more for that traffic. But if your boss or your client is telling you that they want to see performance continue to increase. Well, now you have to bid higher to compete. Again, we go a lot more into depth about that on the Episode 26, Why is LinkedIn Ads so expensive? And like we talked about, just recently on the seasonality episode in Episode 29, if you're advertising in the end of November, or during December, and you're saying, man, why are these North American audiences performing so poorly? or why do I have to pay so much for them, there could be seasonality happening and then if you just wait and be patient until January, or even pull back and then reinvest the money that you would have spent in January, which is what I recommend, then just that knowledge will help you perform better. Something else that's driving competition is that as you learned from Episode 32, where we talked about the COVID report, people are bidding wrong, and they're bidding too high. And what that's doing is it's driving up competition for everyone at an exponential rate. This isn't a problem with the listeners of this podcast, because you've heard me on so many episodes talk about bidding correctly. And that's episode six. By the way, if you want to go back and learn deep on that. But in short, don't use auto bidding unless there's a good reason to like your click through rate is really high, or you need to force getting traffic, because auto bidding is really just max bidding, it's giving LinkedIn your wallet and saying take whatever out of it you think you'll need. And when you are using max CPC bidding, don't follow LinkedIn's bid recommendations unless you've tested lower and you need to increase in order to get enough traffic. 99% of the time, you should start bidding significantly below the range that they recommend. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break. And then we'll dive into what you can actually do about rising competition. 18:23 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. 18:33 If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you, B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $130 million on LinkedIn Ads, and no one outperforms us on getting you the lowest cost per lead. We're official LinkedIn partners and you'll only deal with LinkedIn Ads experts from day one. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to chat about your campaigns. We'd absolutely love to work with you. 18:58 What To Do About It All right, let's jump into what you can do to combat or even reverse this increasing competition that slowly and painfully killing your LinkedIn Ads channel. Keep in mind that sometimes it's the little things that make a difference. So look for these small advantages that you can build and they'll add up. For instance, something so simple as making ad copy improvements, we find through ad copy testing, that we can increase or decrease performance by five to 15%. So let's say you spend some time testing ad copy, and you find that you can raise the click through rates by 15%. It may not be massive, but it's going to do something for you. And those efforts will add up. For your ad cop, remember that people on LinkedIn are valuable people, and they're in a hurry, and that this is interruptive advertising. You need to get right to the point and get to the value as fast as possible. Having your value right front loaded at the beginning of the ad is going to do wonders for you and you might be able to see your click through rates. increased by 30, 50, 100%. And a different example here, I once had an ad that was getting a 1.2% click through rate. And another one in the same campaign was getting a point 7%. So almost half. And this was the same offer, but radically different approach to messaging. I looked at that and said, Okay, I'm going to pause the lower performer, because obviously people don't care about it. That is, until I saw that the lower performer was only costing $1 more per click, but was converting it over twice the rate. So I ended up reversing, I paused the better performer by click through rate, and ended up letting the poor performer go and take all of the impressions. So click through rates are certainly not the end all be all, and you'll need to pay attention to how they affect conversions, but this can help. Generally, a higher click through rate is going to reduce your costs. And win you more impressions at those lower costs. We mentioned episode six about bidding more efficiently. If you're bidding correctly, you're bidding the right way to minimize your costs on LinkedIn, you can pay less for every click, or every impression, or every view, every send. You'll naturally get more clicks and leads for your same budget. And like we mentioned, there are so many people who are bidding incorrectly, that they're pushing costs up for everyone. So please tell your friends. Something else you could try, maybe you're targeting mostly by one type of targeting, and you could test some additional alternative targeting. Maybe you're testing by job title. Well, did you know that job title clicks are some of the most competitive on the platform and that campaign manager only understands about 30% of job titles. What this means is you may be able to use an alternative form of targeting going after this exact same audience. And you might find the ability to either scale or reduce costs by adding that in. If you're only using job title, consider using some additional targeting like job function with seniority skills with seniority and groups, maybe Episode Two goes into our whole targeting strategy. So check that one out. And of course, if you can find additional targeting that gives you more reach for less money, that will give you a nice bump in your performance. And we've talked here before and especially in Episode 10, about how so much of your performance relies on how attractive your offer is. Now, I know that it's significant effort for you as a marketer to create a new offer, but it can make all the difference in the performance of your ads. A good lead magnet will increase your click through rate and decrease your cost per click and increase your conversion rate. These are all three amazing things that will culminate in a much better report to your uppers or your clients. Honestly, the offer can make the difference between fighting to get leads, or having so many that you end up lowering your budget so the sales team can catch up. But because offers are so hard to create, sometimes it helps to know that you don't even have to change the offer, you might be able to just change the title. For example, here, let's say that you have a guide that's really valuable. And I'll make something up here. Like we'll call it the buyer's guide to more effective SAS software. And you're targeting it towards IT managers. Your ads might be playing to the fact that it's a buyers guide, and it's going to help them make better decisions on the software that they decide to purchase. So you end up getting click through rates that are kind of ho hum, like, let's say 0.5%. And maybe your conversion rate is okay at around 10%. So you as a sophisticated marketer, you dive into this guide, and you find a stat in there. And I'm totally making this up. So this is not a real stat. But it says 26% of companies replace their SAS software within three weeks after buying for a competitive product. So you say that's interesting. And you go and change the title of this guide to 26% of SAS purchases end in regret. And then you change the copy on the ads to focus more on this interesting stat. And you're focusing on a different motivation here, all you had to do was change the copy on the PDF, and maybe change some wording on an image in your ad. And that's it. And these are small changes, but now your click through rates could be over 1%. And your conversion rate may spike to 15% or higher. So you'll see why I love this strategy, so much. Simple changes to just repurpose the same piece of content in a different way or to a different motivation. Something else you can do is you can refresh your creative more often. And so much of the time we see that little creative refreshes here and there will give you a temporary bump for a few days. And I don't know how to describe why this is. Maybe it's just because there are more people who are interested in seeing something that they haven't seen before, something that's new and novel. And of course you can always cut inefficiently spending audiences offers or ads If you do if you cut the worst performers, this will, of course, leave more of your budget for the high performers and give you a nice performance bump that I'm sure you'll appreciate come reporting time. And for the love of everything that is good and holy, please disable audience expansion on every campaign, you control. We've talked about this so many times over the last 40 episodes, but it's poison, and you should avoid it like COVID-19 without a mask. 25:27 These next two suggestions are a little bit more strategic. But follow me on this. The first is get ahead of your competition, whatever they're doing, try something different, and even drastically different. If you can get ahead of your competitors, you will easily outperform competition as it continues to rise. In fact, you will contribute to the competition getting harder, and their costs continuing to rise because your ads will have pushed them lower in the auction because you're doing something innovative. And that dovetails nicely into my other suggestion here of push the envelope, try new things. I'll never forget one of our first clients that had an image that was a comic strip. And I insisted to him that it was totally unprofessional, and it wouldn't play well on LinkedIn. It's not the right audience. Well, the client insisted that we should try it. And so I did it begrudgingly. And boy did that shut me up. It ended up being one of the best performing ads that I had ever seen to that point. I've seen similar things with ads that are maybe cartoons or other visuals that quote aren't a fit for LinkedIn. And that's really the point. If something stands out from the rest of the content on LinkedIn, it will get an outsized amount of attention. And as an advertiser, you are rewarded by increasing the attention you get on your ads. Alright, I've got the episode resources coming right up for you, so stick around. 26:57 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 27:08 Resources First off in the show notes, you have to click that contest link. It's bit.ly/linkedInadscontest, all lowercase. Go down, hit it, and submit those high performers, because I guarantee you're gonna love the gift. There's also links to the episode that we mentioned in here, Episode 29 about saturation, Episode 26 about why LinkedIn ads are so expensive, Episode 37 just a few ago, on the seasonality of LinkedIn, why some months cost more and perform less than others, Episode 32 about the effect of COVID on LinkedIn pricing, Episode Two on targeting better, and Episode Six all about pricing and how to bid right on LinkedIn and not increase competition for yourself. And of course, we're very proud of this podcast. The B2Linked team works very hard to do this. But we also realize that a course might be interesting for someone who doesn't want to binge listen to 41 episodes. So check out the link to our LinkedIn Learning course. It is by far the best and cheapest course out there for helping someone get up to speed quickly on LinkedIn Ads. Look down at your podcasting app right now and hit the subscribe button. Make sure that it's lit up because I want you to hear us the next episode that comes out. And of course, please rate the podcast. I would love it if you give it five stars. But if you don't, just tell me why. And please do leave a review on whatever podcast player or service you use. I would love to read those. My heart is just warm every time I read someone who's getting value out of this. And of course I want to shout you out and return the favor. With any questions, suggestions, or even just to say hi, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Episode 06 - Bidding Episode  10 - Calls to Action LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Show Transcript: You got a coupon code for a $50 or $100 free advertising credit on LinkedIn. And you want to know how to maximize it. I got you. This is the LinkedIn Ads Show.Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! We've all seen coupon codes appear from time to time for LinkedIn Ads. Today, we're going to talk about how to get them, how to use them, and then, of course, how to spend that money effectively. In the news, our agency B2Linked just turned six years old. And I'm so proud and excited. In business years, we're no longer a toddler. So that's cool. I'm so proud of our B2Linked team who will stop at nothing to ensure that our clients have success on LinkedIn ads. We also just hired four new account managers here in our Utah office. And we're excited to grow with them. No joke, we got the best and brightest. And I'm honored that they'd see the vision and would agree to join us on our mission to help companies save money on their LinkedIn Ads, and get more leads than they ever thought possible. To celebrate, I have something really cool to give away. So we're going to be doing a contest in the coming weeks. So make sure you're subscribed and pay attention. On a completely unrelated note, if any of you have an idea for a contest, that would be rad for a bunch of LinkedIn Ads fanatics, please email us with ideas. No, but seriously, I've got something really cool to give away. And I can only give away a few. So I definitely want your ideas, we're going to have an awesome contest. I also love to just share things with you that I've found during the week about LinkedIn Ads, and just geek out with you. So I hope you appreciate this. One of our clients showed us a trick this week to delete campaigns from campaign manager, and I was absolutely floored. Now, this is definitely a bug. And as soon as I get a chance to reproduce it in several accounts, and figure out when it works and when it doesn't and see if there's differences by ad formats, I'll tell you all about it. But for right now, I'll just tell you, it's possible, it's a bug, and it's super cool. This week, I also came across the first ad account where text ads were more expensive than sponsored content. Now, because text ads floor is always $2. If you've chosen the US dollar as your currency, but in less competitive markets, because the sponsored content floor is variable, it can go even lower than $2. In this case, the sponsored content floor was $1.10. And text ads were $2. So it's sad, but we ended up shutting off all the text ads, and completely invested all the budget in sponsored content. It was way weird that it worked out that way, but it totally did. I want to shout out a podcast review here. Jadin Press, who's a phenomenal social marketer, as well as developer, he said, "I've periodically found and read numerous blog posts by AJ since I started running LinkedIn ads two years ago, and have more recently been listening to the LinkedIn ads show podcast and can confirm it is fire." Jaden, I'm so glad that you've been getting the value out of this that I'm putting into it and intending. So thank you for being a listener. And I'm so stoked to see what you end up creating. And you, yes, you I want to feature you. So go and leave a review on any podcast service you can find and I would love to shout you out. With that being said, let's hit it. 3:36 Coupon Codes Dan Gingiss, who is a friend and a speaker at many of the same conferences that I speak at. He's the host of the Experience This podcast, which is all about user experience. And he just asked me recently, "so I got an ad from LinkedIn for a free $50 in ad spend coupon and I took it because hey, it's 50 free bucks. So here's my million dollar question for the expert on LinkedIn Ads, "How should I spend the $50 to result in the greatest possibility of me wanting to invest more in LinkedIn Ads?" Dan, this is a fantastic question and I can't wait to go deep on this. For those of you who may not know, occasionally LinkedIn will send out offers or promotional codes. And of course, this isn't unique, as Google has been giving away free money for Google Ads since I think before I was born. But with LinkedIn, the challenge with these coupon codes is that because the clicks are so expensive. If you're not following the strategy I shared in episode six on bidding and budgeting, you'll only get a handful of clicks for your budget, and it really won't teach you anything. That being said, it's certainly not life changing money or anything, but money is money. And at the very least if you chase down one of these codes and apply it in your account, your boss or client will likely appreciate your interest in saving them a few bucks. So how do you get them? Well, I asked a couple friends at LinkedIn to see if there were any channels that I had missed and there are a few ways to get these coupon codes. Of course, Dan, who asked this question, he ended up seeing this in an ad. So it looks like LinkedIn is advertising to some professionals about this free coupon code. So that's one way of getting it. So the most common that I hear recently are because LinkedIn Marketing Solutions is an advertiser on a lot of podcasts. And I've heard these promotions on shows like The Tim Ferriss show, and a whole bunch of others. And as part of this promotion, they offer a coupon code for free advertising. And I would imagine with some clever Google searches, you could find mentions of this in podcast, show notes pages, and find the link in there. When you click on the promotional link, it usually goes to a web page where you enter in your email, and then shortly, LinkedIn will send you a coupon code, and then you can go and apply that in your account. LinkedIn also said that they offer a promo code in what they call global acquisition email campaigns, who are targeting prospective customers. So I think you have to ask yourself, how do you get on LinkedIn's radar as a prospective customer. A few ways I can think of and of course, I don't know this for sure. But maybe consider creating a company page for a company that isn't yet attached to an ad account. Maybe you could sign up for a webinar from the LinkedIn Marketing Solutions team, and list an email that isn't currently attached to an ads account. Maybe you could even fill out a lead form on LinkedIn somewhere, I don't know, but it certainly could be worth poking around a bit to see if you can get on one of those campaigns. And this is one I didn't know, they said that in the EMEA region or Europe, Middle East and Africa, LinkedIn reps can offer coupon codes to existing customers to incentivize them to try new features. So if you're in the EMEA region, ask your rep and see if there's anything cool coming up that you could use a coupon code for. All right, we're gonna take a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into the best strategies for how to actually spend that sweet, sweet coupon cash. 7:04 The LinkedIn Ads show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. If the performance of your LinkedIn ads is important to you, B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $130 million on LinkedIn Ads, and no one outperforms us on getting you the lowest cost per lead. We're official LinkedIn partners, and we don't have a sales team so you'll deal only with the LinkedIn Ads expert from day one. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com, to chat about your campaigns. Or heck, just let your MLM downline know. No matter how you get in touch, we'd love to work with you. 7:45 Redeeming the Coupons Alright, let's jump into redeeming the coupons and actually how to use them. In the past, to enter a coupon code, you had to be the billing admin of the account, but that since changed. So what you do is you log in to campaign manager, and then you click on the little gear icon in the upper right hand corner of your screen, and then click on billing center. Then about halfway down the page, you'll see three tabs. The second tab says coupons and credits. Once you select that, you'll see a button that says redeem coupons. When you click that it will pop up a box that lets you enter in a coupon code and as soon as you select it, it will then spend that money first and then it will continue spending your credit card. Now if you're already advertising on LinkedIn, of course, you're just going to keep advertising and you'll use this coupon code to just augment what you're already doing. But let's say that you're not already advertising. And you're like Dan, who just got this coupon code and wants to give LinkedIn Ads a shot. So this is the strategy I would recommend. First of all, create a new campaign that's using the website visits objective. And then when you get down to the ad formats, choose text ads as your ad format. And this is of course, because text ads have the lowest bid floor. So what you want to do is bid by max cost per click and bid all the way down to the $2 minimum floor. And what this will do is it will stretch your $50 or $100 coupon code the furthest it will go. That means with a $50 coupon code, you'll get 25 clicks out of it and $100 coupon code you'll get 50 clicks out of it. And whether this takes one day to spend that or two months, just let it ride until it finishes. Obviously with a $2 bid when you're bidding all the way at the floor, you're not bidding very competitively. So LinkedIn is not going to want to show your ads a whole ton unless they perform really well. And then as for the offer, you'll want to point these ads towards something that you know has the highest conversion rate that you own. And that will give you the highest probability of actually getting some conversions from these 25 or 50 clicks. Think about things like guides, ebooks, checklists, and go and listen to Episode 10, all about offers and calls to action, to look for some ideas. If after a few days, you find your click through rates are over .085%. That's a good clue that you could switch your bidding to CPM and it will stretch even further. If you do this, you'll see your cost per click actually drops below $2. That sounds like a win to me. And for your targeting, you'll want to make your targeting as tight around your absolute ideal target audience as possible. And this is because when you see these leads come in, it would sure be nice to see some golden prospects in there, people representing companies that you would absolutely love to work with. That could mean using an account based marketing audience where you're specifying a company list. It could be using tight targeting like job title, or even groups targeting, maybe groups with seniority. And of course, if you haven't heard it before, make sure you uncheck the box that says enable audience expansion. It's absolute poison, and you should avoid it like COVID-19. And voila, if you get two to four conversions from this $50 coupon code, and they are from your absolute ideal target audience, chances are that you'll want to put your credit card in permanently and keep going and you'll want to scale up. And just as a little insurance policy for you, you might want to set a lifetime budget of $50 or $100 on that campaign. And that way, you'll ensure that it doesn't continue spending on your credit card more until you're absolutely good and ready. So that's my suggested strategy on how to best utilize a very small amount of free ad credit. I'd love to hear how you'd use it, though. So email us at podcast@B2Linked.com and share with us your strategy. The biggest limitation of these coupon codes that we found is that most are only one use per ad account. So once you've redeemed one in your account, you won't be able to use another one later on. So of course you can be a great guy or gal and hand one of these codes to a co worker or a friend or a fellow business owner. Or you can open up a new ad account. Either way, that's how you'll want to work around those limitations. All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming up. So stick around. 12:30 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. Resources All right, two of the episodes we mentioned during this podcast, you'll want to listen to episode six on bidding and budgeting. If you look down in the show notes, you'll see a link right to that. And then Episode 10, we mentioned all about your calls to action and offers. Those are two of our most popular episodes and if you haven't listened already, you'll definitely want to listen to those. They are not outdated. If you or anyone you're working with is actively looking to learn LinkedIn Ads, check out the link in the show notes to our course on LinkedIn Learning, all about LinkedIn advertising. It's one of the best LinkedIn Ads courses out there and the price is right. It is just a small fraction of what it would cost to hire me to come and train your team, so it's definitely worthwhile. And then when you're done, you'll get the certification to add to your LinkedIn profile, saying that you finished the course. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast. So you're hearing us in your earholes every week. And then please do look down at your podcast player and rate and leave a review for the podcast. If you review us all shout you out here on the podcast so I'd absolutely love to do that. And please tell a fellow LinkedIn Ads fanatic about the podcast, if they haven't heard about it already. Of course, I'd love for this podcast to be your secret weapon, but don't let it be too secret. Share it around. With any suggestions for topics or questions for us, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com And remember to send ideas for a contest we could run because I really want to give you guys something way cool. All right, with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources: Episode 14 - Low Budgets Episode 22 - How to Scale Episode 15 - Benchmarks Episode  10 - High Performing Offers LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Show Transcript: Your LinkedIn Ads are performing well, but your boss or client isn't giving you much budget. This week, we're making the case for scaling on the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. So we highlighted someone back on the q&a episode, her name is Felicia Gheorghe, and she asked this question and I thought it was definitely deserving of a more detailed dive. I tend to recommend some pretty large numbers in budget and spend. And so she asked, "Hey, I'm struggling with really low budget over here. What numbers do I bring up to justify and convince that scaling up and add is necessary?" And this is a really good question. Because when we're faced with really small budgets, and our boss or our client won't give us additional, we really do have to build the business case around, "Hey, this really is performing well, you should feed it while it's working." So we'll get into all of that today. In the news, I just got back from vacation and so I'm struggling to record this at like seven o'clock at night. I think I just decided I'm never going to take another vacation again. But a nice little piece of news, B2Linked just turned six years old last week, so Happy Birthday to us. And a friend of the show, Kylee Lessard, who's a product marketing manager at LinkedIn. She shared a poll last week and I wanted to just share the results of this because I thought this was really interesting for everyone. She asked, "What kind of stories content do you want to see from brands on LinkedIn?" And the options were info, like news events and products. Educational, like data, insights, tips, tricks. And people, employees and culture. And then there's another other category where people could vote in. And I personally think that educational content, like data, insights, tips, tricks, would be the most interesting content to me. So that's what I voted for. And as soon as we can see the results here, 57% voted the same way I did. People with employees and culture came in second place with 26%. And news and info came in a measly 13%. And I think this answered perfectly a question that I've had for a long time, which is, in a business to business context, what sort of content do you put in a stories, ad or even in a company's story. So based off of this poll, I'm going to start with more of that educational content. Thanks, Kylie for hosting that poll. And a friend this week, who is part of the alpha for stories ads, he shared something that was a little disheartening to me, but it's probably not in its final revision. He said that when you're part of the alpha, you don't bid for stories inventory separately from a separate campaign, you do it as basically a checkbox onto a sponsored content campaign. So if you have something that sponsored content running, then this would just be another Inventory slot that you could stick sponsored content into. Personally, I think that would be a terrible user experience, if that were to continue. So I hope we get our own inventory with it. And then from an advertising perspective, I really hope that we're getting our own inventory and we can bid specifically for it, because that means low costs get in before the competition happens. So we'll see in the beta or when it finally comes out for release, I'm crossing my fingers that we get a really low floor bid so we can really start talking about the great deals that can be had on LinkedIn. I wanted to highlight a review from CRBladen, who's in Great Britain. He said, "He speaks my language. I love ajs podcast. He's super knowledgeable and give sound and strategic advice for LinkedIn marketers. As a freelance LinkedIn marketer, it's great to hear someone geek out over LinkedIn Ads and share my passion for the platform. Thanks, AJ." Hey CRBladen, thanks so much for saying that. I will geek out with you anytime. I would love to feature you as well, talking to you listener, to leave a review on whatever podcast platform you listen to. And I would absolutely love to give you a shout out. All right, with that being said, let's hit it. So diving into this issue of starting with a low budget and then wanting to prove out the model so that you can scale, it's really helpful to have listened to Episode 14. That's all about basically how to have success with small budgets. So feel free to pause this one, and then go and binge listen to Episode 14 and come back or quite honestly, they're okay in reverse as well. So to me making the case about taking a smaller budget and growing it either to my boss or the company's owner or the client, it all comes down to confidence. And I certainly don't know all of your individual situations because everyone's situation is different. But I've talked to some who have low budgets because maybe one they've been burned by an agency that's done bad work, and so they're Trying to lower their risk, Two maybe they have money, but the Exec team needs to see the quote unquote, results, before going all in. Three, they don't understand how digital marketing works. And then it's our job to educate them on investing enough to make sure we have a sizable amount that tells us whether or not it's working. Or number four here, they just don't have the money to invest. And I know this is a hot take, potentially, but I don't think it's our job as marketers to change the financial culture of the company. So if you really feel like your growth is being stifled because you're killing it on LinkedIn Ads, and you want to scale, but you just can't make a case for them to grant you more budget, then I would say it's not your job to fight that battle. And it might be better just to drop the client, or maybe even switch companies if your internal. And I know this is a LinkedIn Ads podcast, but the nature of LinkedIn ads is really high risk. First of all, it's expensive. And so any mistake you make is automatically an expensive mistake. And then also the traffic is more mid to top of funnel. So it's these long sales cycles, and people just aren't ready to make big commitments yet. And so if you have an executive who's looking to see quote, unquote, results, for my experience, that usually means that they're looking for a return on their investment, which isn't going to happen fast with LinkedIn Ads 99% of the time, because it's specifically for longer sales cycles. It's catching people outside of their level of intent. So the risks to you as a marketer in going out on a limb to fight for additional budget, just because you have confidence in the results, it puts you at risk of really looking bad to your boss or bad to the client. And certainly that's scary. That's something that we really need to consider. On the flip side of that, though, I do think that you as a marketer have the responsibility to first of all, be aware of the financial situation of the company, and the number to be aware of the financial culture of the company, so that you don't stick out like a sore thumb by pushing them to increase budgets, and then end up losing your job or looking bad or leaving a bad taste in someone's mouth. And based on that, you definitely want to pick your battles, because maybe your company has the money. And you know that LinkedIn Ads has the best potential for the highest quality leads, and you need to fight to change your executives minds. Or maybe your company doesn't have the money to scale. So you decide to sit back and just keep doing the best job you can, even with a low budget, even if you are highly confident that it would scale. So if it's a battle you want to fight, then absolutely go for it. But your relationship with the exec team, I feel like is super valuable. And LinkedIn Ads is a high risk platform by nature. So guard your reputation and guard your job before you go on a fight just to increase your budget. So if you're looking for the formula on how to scale, definitely go back and listen to Episode 22. It's all about how to take good results and scale them up. But what we're going to cover today is how to identify whether there's something there that's worth scaling, and really how to analyze your traffic, your conversions, your lead quality. So we're gonna dive a little bit deeper in here. 8:20 Case Study I want to share a case study from a client that we worked with. And the company is called pilot.com. And they provide SAS software for bookkeepers. And our partners, they're ultra sharp marketers, which is always a plus. They were spending a really healthy five figure per month budget. And they were spending that with us for many months. And then suddenly they came to us and said that they wanted to increase their budget by nine times overnight, ASAP. Well, scalability and efficiency are kind of our thing. So we did this with a plone. we rebuilt the account structure to sustain that kind of growth, which if you're curious, go back and listen to episode seven on how we do that. And we were totally successful at nine xing the budget overnight. And it was incredible. We stayed perfectly within the efficiency thresholds of the cost per MQL that we needed. So I'm sure patting myself on the back. And I'm telling myself this story that we did such a great job at managing the ads that they went and had an internal meeting and started comparing to the other channels. And they were instantly blown away when they saw the numbers that LinkedIn Ads performance was so mammoth compared to the others that they realized they needed to suddenly nine x their budget, but the truth probably is more than if we would have been paying attention to the signs along the way. We could have been a lot more proactive in suggesting smaller budget increases early on, and we could have taken advantage of the faster growth opportunities as we saw them and gained confidence in their LinkedIn leads. We're definitely not a salesy type of organization. We're not pushy to our clients. So we're the last ones who are proactively, going to our clients and saying you should spend more. Because as an agency, I feel really dirty suggesting that because as clients spend more, we make more. And so it seems really disingenuous. But if we would have done that, if we could have taken advantage of the three to six months beforehand where we could have made smaller gains, I think we would have been further ahead than if we just waited for this realization that the LinkedIn leads are gold. And we should suddenly nine x our traffic and have that drop like a ton of bricks. 10:30 Comparison So as you're running your campaigns, what you first want to do is take a look at your metrics. And it's pretty easy to see that the top line performance and engagement metrics, but I know you you're a sophisticated marketer, and you're going to go deeper than that. You're going to dive into your CRM and pull out your cost per MQL, cost Per SQL, cost per SAL, cost per proposal, cost per closed deal. And then what you want to do is compare your numbers to the benchmarks that I shared in Episode 15. And if you know that you're significantly above benchmark in everything, your confidence should be really high that you're on the right track. And that given a higher budget, you could probably do a great job. And as soon as you start looking at those bottom of the funnel types of metrics like MQLs, SQLs, closes, you'll definitely want to compare this to your other marketing channels. Because let's say for instance, your cost per SAL on Google is like $3,000 and on LinkedIn, it's 2000, there'd be a really good case to be made for taking budget from Google. And I think you also need to realize that your account is in a constant evolution of your ammo that we've talked about before. It's your audiences, your messages and your offers. And I'm sure that you know that your cost per MQL, cost per SQL, and deeper, these are lagging metrics. And so if you look at them now, they'll tell you the story of what was happening in the account weeks or even months ago. So as you evolve your offers and messaging tests, there may be significant room for improvement, that just given a little bit more time to bake out, you can actually realize, and I've said this before, but my recommendation is don't compare with Facebook on like a cost per click, or click through rate, or cost per lead level because LinkedIn is significantly more expensive and the targeting is so much more precise. If you do compare and start robbing LinkedIn of your budget, just because Facebook is cheaper on a cost per lead basis, you'll likely end up cheating yourself out of the real value of LinkedIn, which is the lead quality. And similarly, don't compare your results with Google ads if you're looking at just cost per click, click through rate and CPL because search channels score really high in intent, which makes sense because you're targeting the people who are already looking for what it is you do, but they score really low in the budget and authority categories, which tells you if someone is actually able to purchase from you, and do they have the authority to do that. They're fundamentally very different channels. And they tend to actually work really well hand in hand, rather than head to head. Okay, here's the quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into the order of confidence for scaling. 13:19 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you, B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $130 million on LinkedIn ads, and no one outperforms us on getting you the lowest cost per lead. We're official LinkedIn partners, and we don't have a sales team so you'll deal only with LinkedIn ads, experts from day one. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com and we'd love to chat with you about your campaigns. Or heck, show up to our offices on horseback. No matter how you get in touch, we'd love to work with you. 14:00 Order of Confidence For Scale Alright, let's jump into the order of confidence. And what I mean by order of confidence is, as you're advertising, you're going to amass certain metrics. And then based off of how good those metrics are, it will probably give you more confidence that either what you're doing is working, or it's not working, and you should change tactics. So if you're looking at your ads, and you're looking at just the impressions number, what does this tell you? Well, really not very much. Your bidding really qualifies the ad to be worth LinkedIn's while to show to people to give it impressions and that's not very confidence inspiring in my book. But then you go to the next rung down and we start looking at click through rates. Now definitely compared to the benchmarks that we laid out in Episode 15. And that will tell you whether you're being successful at crafting a message that people are either more or less likely to click on. And this is great, but it also doesn't make a strong case for getting additional budget to scale. You've just proven that you can write something that people want to click on. So now you're looking at the conversions or leads number. You're generating conversions and leads and that's great. It means you're offering something that people actually want. And this is quite a bit more inspiring. Similarly, if you're looking at your conversion rate, you can find that you've got enough conversions coming in that you can start to feel confident in how effective your offer is, at getting people, especially cold traffic to reveal themselves to you, to fill out a form. If you have a 12% conversion rate, that tells you that one out of every eight people that you engage with on the ad will end up converting and that feeling is a lot more confidence inspiring to me. You can also now calculate based on your cost per click, what you can expect your cost per lead to be. If you divide your cost per click by your conversion rate percentage, that will tell you what your cost per conversion is. So if you know what your max cost per lead is, and you know what your conversion rate is, you can use basic algebra to figure out how much you're able to bid for traffic, and still stay underneath your goal cost per conversion. So let's say that you have a 12% conversion rate. And you've determined that you want to stay under $120 per conversion. So in this case, we're trying to solve for cost per click, so that's our variable. We're going to divide that by 12%, or .12. So let's say that you have a 12% conversion rate. And you've determined that you want to stay under $120 per conversion. So again, this is basic algebra, so try to follow along. Because good crap, this would work so much better if you could see this So our formula here is your cost per click over your conversion rate equals 120. Our conversion rate is .12, or 12%. here. And so if you evaluate that, you end up multiplying both sides by 12%, you end up with a max cost per click of $14.40. And so in that case, I would go and set a manual bid of maybe even up to $14.50 or $14.75. So I'm going to land somewhere around there. And like I said, that's pretty confidence inspiring. But we can go deeper here. If you're looking at the MQLs or marketing qualified leads level, now you're seeing that your leads are actually turning into marketing qualified leads. For most B2B organizations, this means that the lead quality is high enough for them to qualify to move on to have someone in the sales department take a look at them. And this is confidence inspiring, because you at this point, you know that your targeting is good, you know that your leads aren't garbage, they're passing that initial threshold. The next step is really looking at lead quality and this can be either anecdotal feedback that you get from a sales team, or you have a lead scoring mechanism inside, let's say, your CRM or marketing automation system. When you get enough leads, that you start to get feedback on their quality, this gives you a lot more confidence in your LinkedIn ads performance. And I've also found that anecdotal feedback, even if it's not statistically significant, it can sway sales teams, or sway executives, simply because this is a second voice, a second testimony that what you're what you're saying is true. The next stage is SQL or sales qualified lead. And every B2B company has different names for these stages so this is just the basics. But, you might call it an SAL, you might call it a BPO, whatever you call it, it's just the next qualifying stage. And this stage is actually my favorite stage to track and for marketing to be held accountable to because it incorporates both the lead quality, because it incorporates both the lead quality from my targeting, as well as the cost efficiency that we're driving. At this stage, you're starting to see your leads be qualified in the sales process is having promise. And these could start leading to close deals and this is amazing. This really gives me the ultimate confidence in my advertising efforts. Because now I can present a cost per SQL and an SQL conversion rate. And I can go to the executive team or I can go to the client and inspire a lot of confidence in additional budget, especially if you can say, oh, and in the last few weeks, we've made some big additions to the platform, and it's likely going to do even better than that as the database out. And of course, if you're a big spender or you've just been driving this traffic long enough, you can start to see proposals come in when your leads start getting proposals at volume. And let's say they have a near 50% chance of closing. This gives excellent confidence that actually efforts are turning into a return on investment. Even if it takes that deal, three months to go from proposal to close, if you've got 10 of these things, and you know that they have a 50% chance of closing, that might as well be money in the bank. But of course, what every business owner wants is closed deals. And so when you start amassing enough data, that you can generate closed deals, and track them at some kind of volume. I think that's all the confidence that you'll ever need. But of course, we definitely need to talk about limitations, because not every audience is scalable. Not every offer is scalable. So let's jump into some of the things that might stop you from being able to scale. The first is your audience size, let's say that you want to scale and you even have the budget. But if your audience sizes are too small, you just won't be able to spend more budget on them. And as you implement the things that we learned for Episode 22, all about scaling, you might find that you've already hit this level of diminishing returns, because your audience just isn't big enough. And unfortunately, this is just kind of the way it is, it's possible that you've already found the optimal amount of scale in your account. And that's actually good to find out where your limitations are. 21:12 Limitations The next limitation, though, is a lot easier to deal with. And this is your click through rate. It might be that everything you launch has click through rates between, let's say, 0.4%, and 0.5%. So even if your audience is nicely sized, because so few people are actually clicking on your ads, you just can't generate enough traffic to spend what you want. In this case, the limiting factor for you is most likely your offer itself. Go back and listen to Episode 10 to learn all about offers. If you can go and create an offer that is so attractive that all of a sudden, every ad that you write gets a click through rate of 1% or higher, this will instantly give you opportunities to double your traffic, and even drop your cost per click significantly. There was one notable case where we had two different ads, both going to the same audience. One was getting a click through rate of like 1.3%. And the other was getting like 0.6%. And so I looked at that and said, "Wow, the ad that's getting a 1.2% click through rate is obviously a much better ad. Let's scale that." But then as soon as we started looking at the conversions that were coming from it, we found that the ad that got clicked on less the one with 0.6% click through rate ended up having a conversion rate that was three times higher. So we paused that high performing ad, even though it was amazing at getting people to click because conversions are so much more important. Remember as advertisers, the closer you can get to the money, the more valuable your decisions and actions are. All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around. 22:59 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 23:10 Resources If you haven't already, check out Episode 14 all about low budgets. And then Episode 22 is all about how to scale up effectively and efficiently. We mentioned account structure, which Episode Seven goes into. And then you should definitely listen to Episode 15 all about benchmarks to let you know if you're doing a good job, or if you're totally falling off the horse. And of course, a classic, one of our most popular episodes Episode 10, all about crafting the right offer and the right call to action. If you are one of your colleagues is looking to learn LinkedIn, point them towards the LinkedIn Learning course on LinkedIn advertising. I am the humble author of that. But I can say it's a really surprisingly good course especially for the price that LinkedIn Learning charges for which I think is $25 or free. You'll see the link right down below in the show notes where you can click right to it. Also make sure to subscribe on whatever podcast player you're listening to right now. And then please do rate and review the podcast. If you review, I'd love to shout you out. With any episode ideas or feedback, hit us up at podcast at B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources: Install event tracking tutorial on YouTube How to set up event tracking in Google Tag Manager walkthrough. LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Show Transcript: LinkedIn Ads conversion tracking is confusing and technical, and hungry and delicious. I must be recording this around dinnertime. This is the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. Conversion tracking is something that I get a lot of questions on. How do you set it up? How do you troubleshoot it if it's not working? How do you track separate conversion events through the funnel? So the whole episode is all about that. We'll cover the basics and we'll go super geeky deep because I'm sorry, I just can't do it any other way. In personal news, I'm on vacation this week. So this is obviously recorded before then, we're headed to Southern California. And I have to say COVID vacations aren't very much fun. My wife and kiddos absolutely love the beach. But my poor ginger skin doesn't. So wish me luck, and sunscreen. I wanted to highlight a review from Abby Kelsey, who's a social media and branding strategist. She says, "Hands down the best podcast for LinkedIn Ads. After listening to just a few episodes, I was able to optimize the campaign, reducing the cost per click from $14 to $15 down to $4 to $5. AJ is great at simplifying strategy. I look forward to every new episode." Abby, thanks so much, I'm so glad that our advice was able to help you get your CPCs down that much. Because as you know, when you reduce your costs down to a third of where they were, then your ROI can be three times as much. So great job to you and actually taking the advice and making changes in your account. And you, yes, you! I want to feature you as well. So go and leave a rating on whichever podcast app that you like or prefer that or that you know, has ratings. And I'll love to shout you out and share your experience with the general listeners public here. All right, with that being said, let's hit it. 2:02 Conversion Tracking I remember sitting down with the VP over LinkedIn Marketing Solutions back in 2014. I remember this conversation very well. He asked near the end of our discussion, if I had a magic wand and I could wave it and change any feature or add any feature to LinkedIn ads, what would it be? And I told him conversion tracking. He sat back and folded his arms defensively and asked, "Okay, why do you think advertisers would want that?" From his reaction, you could totally tell that he and the product team at that time had already discussed conversion tracking many times. And they had already come to the conclusion that it was a feature that they didn't need. I explained that all the popular ad platforms had conversion tracking. That it really was table stakes as a feature at this point. And I also knew of affiliate marketers who worked out of their moms basements that had built their own tracking tag. So it really couldn't be that hard. He explained that according to LinkedIn, the most sophisticated advertisers had already devised systems for tracking conversions, and the less sophisticated ones weren't even asking for it. I agreed that we'd already implemented our own workarounds. But that having conversions in the platform would allow us to pivot faster rather than just exporting add data to excel and marrying it up to conversion data later on. It's not a horribly long process, but it did take time. And it wasn't nearly as immediate as if we had conversions just right within the platform. And to LinkedIn, of course, when advertisers can pivot faster, it means finding success quicker, which leads to larger investments in ad budget. So it made a lot of sense to me. Now, I must have been incredibly convincing to him, because LinkedIn, of course did implement conversion tracking a short three years later. But the principle stands, the more visibility you have into what works all the way down the funnel, the faster and with more confidence you're going to move. Having conversion tracking directly within campaign manager means that you can monitor whether a new offer is converting within hours of launching the ads. It really adds confidence that you're spending your precious dollars, where they're being best used. Most of us experienced marketers have probably felt the searing pain in your stomach when you launched everything perfectly. And then realize hours later that there was some crucial piece that you left out and either wasted a bunch of money, or made you look like a moron to your boss. Heaven knows I have. Conversion tracking allows us to keep tabs on an account and have the confidence that you're not wasting money or going to look like a moron to your boss or client. 4:32 How Does Conversion Tracking Work? So how does conversion tracking technology work? Well, it really is a simple technology. The way it works is that you tell the ad platform a web page that the only way that someone could get to it is if they filled out a form or converted. Oftentimes, we call this page a thank you page or a success page. There's no link to it from the website. There's no other way to get there. It's what we call an orphaned page. And then you make it so as soon as someone submits the form, it redirects them to that thank you page. Then when the ad platform sees that one of the people that referred hit that page, it knows that someone filled out a form and gets to call it a conversion. So how does LinkedIn know what the members doing when they're not on LinkedIn anymore? The answer is the insight tag. This is a piece of JavaScript code that you put on all the pages of your website. It's really similar to Google Analytics code. And it's going to track all the basic activities of a visitor, and it radios them back to LinkedIn, like a second set of eyes for LinkedIn to see what happens to their traffic after it leaves. It also places a cookie in the visitors browser to identify them. And consequently, this is also why LinkedIn doesn't report a conversion, when you click on the ad preview to convert, LinkedIn knows that this ad wasn't actually served to you because your browser doesn't have the cookie. So it knows it's not really game time yet, and doesn't need to report that conversion. And then it gets really simple. LinkedIn knows from the cookie who the visitor is, and which ad they clicked on, or even saw, which we'll talk about later. And then they made it to the thank you page. Easy peasy, jot one down in the conversions column. So of course, you're going to need the insight tag installed. 6:14 Set It Up Here's a quick rundown of how to set it up. Inside of campaign manager, you go to account assets, and then click insight tag. I won't belabor you with all the instructions, just follow whatever instructions you see on the screen to get access to your tag. And then once you havenit, you want to install it by having your web developer or if you're geeky like that, it can be you. Go and paste that JavaScript into the head section of the HTML on every page of your website. For the uninitiated, you can paste it into each page manually, but that's obviously a huge pain, especially depending on how many pages you have. The better option is to place it in your website's global template, which is just one piece of code that loads on every page of the website. If you can do that, it's a one and done. But then the even better way to do this is through a Tag Manager like Google Tag Manager, which is free. This way you put the JavaScript code for Tag Manager on the website once or have the web developer do it. And then you've got this interface where you as a marketer can log in anytime you want. And you can paste all of your tracking tags whenever you want, then they're going to magically populate across the whole website. So you can throw your LinkedIn insight tag, and your Google Analytics tag, and your Google ads, and Facebook ads, and Twitter tags, everything you want, you can change in and out. Once the tags installed, it starts sending signals to LinkedIn. And that's whenever a LinkedIn member loads a page of your website, the JavaScript fires, and it radios that information back to LinkedIn. And then back in campaign manager, LinkedIn will show you your domain name with a green light showing that it's actively receiving signals. If it's still showing a red light next to your insight tag domain name, then there's probably something wrong with the way that the tag was implemented. So check on that. Once the tags installed on your website, then you go into campaign manager and set up your conversion. This is that part where you define to LinkedIn, which web page when someone lands on, it means that they converted. So you go to account assets, then conversions, and then click create a conversion. Name something descriptive of the conversion like contact form lead or content download. And then in section one with the settings, just take all the defaults for now. Section two, select all the campaigns that you would want to actually be tied to this conversion event. And I say pick them all, why not. And then section three is the most important part. This is where you tell LinkedIn which page or pages to count as a conversion. And there are three different ways that you can define what this page looks like. There's equals, starts with, and my personal favorite, contains. So with equals, you can say, hey, here is the exact single URL that anytime someone lands on this, nothing extra after it or before, it's just this URL, then you know they converted. Starts with would be if you have the beginning of a URL that does stay the same, but maybe some dynamic parameters at the end can change. And then contains, this is where you get to pick one element of the URL that's common among several pages. And it doesn't matter if the beginning or the end changes. As long as it has this one piece, then you know, it's a conversion. And that's really it create the conversion. And if you set it up correctly, it should be tracking conversions from here on out. Now I know what you're gonna say. You'll say I went to ask my web developer to have our lead form redirected to a thank you page and he laughed at me and then announced to the whole team that I just asked for a thank you page. He asked me if I got stuck in the 90s and if I still code HTML in tables. He even went and slashed my tires in the parking lot and put his lunch leftovers in my garbage can every day, so it would smell. And then he even blatantly refused to help, and told me that I have to find another way because that quote unquote, just won't be possible. Trust me, I feel your pain. We've all been there. Now there is a way around this, which we'll cover here right after the sponsor break. 10:24 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. 10:34 If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you, B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $130 million on LinkedIn Ads, and no one outperforms us on getting the lowest cost per lead. We're official LinkedIn partners, and we don't have a sales team, so you'll only deal with LinkedIn AAds experts from day one. Fill out the contact form on any page of bt linkedin.com, to chat about your campaigns. Or heck, send the intention out to the universe. No matter how you get in touch, we'd love to work with you. 11:04 Event Based Alright, let's jump into what to do if you just have no choice, but to have a form on your landing page that when submitted, that URL stays the same in your browser and it just pops up a modal saying thanks. We'll reach out to you shortly. Now if this is the case, it is still possible to track conversions. And the way it works is this, LinkedIn will give you this little snippet of code that you can attach to a button on your page, that as soon as the button is pushed, it executes the JavaScript and sends a conversion right back to LinkedIn. So sounds simple, right? Well, for me, as a non coder, I don't know hardly anything about JavaScript, it really isn't. This isn't just a piece of HTML code that you can paste on into the page, it's JavaScript, and it breaks my poor ginger brand, just thinking about it. If you have Google Tag Manager installed, this is a lot easier. And you don't need to go and start a war with your web developers. in the show notes below. I've linked to a helpful walkthrough video by my friend Joe Martinez of Clix Marketing. That's right, Joe, I just named dropped you. I've also linked to a great written guide by Brandon Green on the B2Linked blog, if you'd rather work with a post that you can follow along to rather than a YouTube video. The way it works is this, when you're creating the conversion, you click the option, use an event specific pixel to track when there is no unique URL, for example, a button click. Then as soon as you create the conversion, it will give you this little snippet of code to attach to the button. If your developer is worth half the lunch, he keeps dumping in your trash can, he'll know exactly what to do with it when you send him the code and point to the button that you wanted to attach to. But remember, you do still need the global Insight tag across your whole website anyway. So this doesn't replace that. The reason why web developers feel so strongly about this is because redirecting to a new page, just to show success is the old way of doing things. And they claim it's not the best user experience. But I'm a fairly technical marketer. And if I can create a thank you page in raw HTML from scratch, but I can't figure out how to set up event tracking without Google Tag Manager, I'll tell you what I would recommend. I can troubleshoot thank you page conversion tracking perfectly, but I'm absolutely useless setting up event tracking, without looping in a web developer. So sure, I'm advocating an old way of doing things that provides a poor user experience. But there is one big benefit of using thank you pages. And that is thank you pages are the most underutilized real estate on the whole internet. Think of this, someone just filled out a form and gave you their contact info, maybe because they wanted to download a piece of your content or join a webinar. They've already identified who they are. And you can use this opportunity to cross sell or upsell them on something. So let's say you're pitching people to join a webinar, because you know, that's what they're willing to do. But what if you had a call to action on your thank you page that said, great, you're signed up for the webinar. By the way, if you haven't already, grab a time on our calendly and we can walk you through something? Sure, not everyone's going to take you up on that. But if anyone does, you just took your lead from a content download to maybe even an MQL or an SQL just like that. So if you're using thank you pages, definitely try to leverage them a little bit more to help get multiple conversions happening. 14:27 How Other Channels Work with Conversion Tracking The way that conversion tracking works on LinkedIn is pretty similar to how other channels are. Facebook conversion tracking is a lot more complex because to set it up, you actually have to modify the base tag on any page where a conversion occurs. At least the last time I did it, the documentation sucked. And so it was really confusing, but it is very cool because it can pass dynamic signals back to Facebook, like for instance, the purchase amount from an ecommerce store. So if you're running Facebook ads for ecommerce rather than than just saying, oh, the average order value is about $30, it will actually pass back the exact amount. So at the end of the day, you can see exactly what your return on adspend was. Google Analytics, goal tracking is similar to LinkedIn, where you put the tag on every page, and then you go into the interface and tell it what counts as a conversion action. It's much more full featured, and a lot more confusing, too. But one really cool feature it has that I really wish we could do on LinkedIn is that when you define a conversion, you can click a button, and it will tell you what the conversion rate of that page would have been in the last seven days, I think it's seven days. So basically, if you're setting up a conversion, that isn't going to work, because you messed something up, you can know right, then without having to launch it, and then watch and see that conversions aren't happening, and then go back and try to fix it. So please, LinkedIn implement this to help us understand when we create a conversion, whether or not it's working immediately. 15:57 Is Conversion Tracking Not Working? Check These Things. So what about if your conversion tracking isn't working properly? Well, here are my steps to actually check and make sure every step of the way and find out what's broken. First, go and make sure that your insight tag is installed on the landing page. If it was pasted right into the HTML, that's really easy. You just go inside your browser, when you're looking at the page. On PC, you just click Ctrl+U that shows you the source. And then Ctrl+F allows you to search on the page. And you can just type in the word LinkedIn and search through. And as soon as you find the actual insight tag, verify that it matches the insight tag that LinkedIn gave you in campaign manager exactly. And I'm telling you, it has to be exact if it's missing a comma or something, it won't work. Now, if the tag was implemented through Tag Manager, this is a little bit harder, because you won't actually see that tag in the HTML. So I use the ghostery plugin in Chrome, because it'll show me what's happening with the JavaScript on the page, which is exactly where Google tag manager or any other tag manager is going to put it. My geeky friends telling me that this is because it's on the event layer in JavaScript, I have no idea what that means. Step two, go and do exactly the same thing on your thank you page, open up the source or ghostery, look to make sure the tag is there. And if your tag is in both places, you're looking good so far. Step three here is go and actually check and make sure that your conversion was set up properly in campaign manager. So you go back to account assets, conversions, and then make sure that the thank you page is entered into the conversion settings in campaign manager. And sometimes just to be sure, I'll stack the conversion triggers, like maybe one line says it starts with B2Linked.com/thank you. And then you can add an or and I can say, or it just contains the word thank you. And then if one of those two wasn't set up properly, maybe the other one will still pick up the conversion. That's like my little conversion insurance policy. Step four here is that just realize that conversions can take like two to four hours to register inside of campaign manager. So give it a little bit of time, if a conversion just occurred, and you're watching it, you don't see it, don't just assume it's broken, wait two to four hours. And unfortunately, there isn't a great way that I found to test conversions in LinkedIn, you really just have to set it up and then watch and campaign manager with high hopes while you wait for conversions to start displaying. So if anyone knows of a way to do this without just sitting around, crossing your fingers and hoping, please let me know, I would love some kind of trick or hack around this. Now, sometimes your conversions you might see are double counting, maybe they're counting more conversions occurring, then you're actually getting leads in the CRM for and this is often because you defined a URL in your conversion and campaign manager that has something in common with another web page. Or maybe there's a sub page that someone can click on from your thank you page that adds into the URL. So every page load after that counts as a conversion. Like, for instance, if we had B2Linked.com/thank you/epic, or something like that loading that epic page would count as a second conversion after they hit the thank you page. 19:19 Some Things to Watch Out For Now some things that you'll want to watch out for. If you're watching your conversions column within campaign manager, be aware that this number is a liar. It counts both post click and view through conversions. So I'll define what these are. Post click conversions actually means that someone clicked on my ad. And then within the clicks window that you set in the settings of your conversion within campaign manager, the default 30 days, they ended up on that thank you page. So they clicked on your ad, and they eventually converted within 30 days. That one makes a lot of sense to me. But then view through conversions are simply when your ad registered an impression on their browser and then they ended up on the thank you page through some other channel, you literally have no idea if the impression even had an influence on their converting, they could have just scrolled right past your post and missed it entirely. So all of our client reporting is done with the post click conversions number, rather than just using the easy conversions. Because I'll tell you, nothing is more embarrassing if you're a highly specialized LinkedIn ads agency than when your account manager reports the client that there were six conversions. And the client says, Oh, I only see four in the CRM. And then you realize that you just read the conversions column. And it added in the view through conversions, or so I've been told. 20:41 Other Cool Uses of the LinkedIn Insight Tag Conversion tracking isn't the only thing that you'll want to use the LinkedIn insight tag for. Once it's on the website, it enables two other cool features. The first is the free web demographics that LinkedIn provides. And it should have been called LinkedIn analytics to pair with Google Analytics and Facebook analytics, because it is a free analytic tool to understand how people are using your website. But once it's installed, you can see a breakdown of the makeup of your website users. And these are from any source, even unpaid. You can see if your website traffic tends to be of a certain seniority, or even which companies tend to be frequenting your website the most. The other great benefit to your insight tag is it enables website retargeting. So now you can set up something like, hey, if someone visited any page of our website, follow them around and remind them to come back and convert. 21:33 Cool Conversion Hacks Now there are a couple of cool little hacks or tricks that I like to use with the conversion tracking here. The first is if you have multiple conversion events, like let's say you have a white paper and a webinar, I don't want to go and create an individual conversion for each one of those. Because that means every single new piece of content that we come out with, we have to go and create a new conversion for. And that's just a lot of work and it's probably something that you're going to forget. And then you'll lose the conversion tracking until you fix it. So instead, I create a convention on all of my assets, that maybe they all have a separate thank you page. But I put something in the URL in common among all thank you pages. And maybe that's just the term thank-you. And so it doesn't matter in the future, how many different assets we run, as long as all the thank you pages have thank-you in the URL. This one conversion event that I set up where I said it contains thank-you, call that a conversion, it's always going to work. So that'll save you some time. Another little hack here is it's kind of hard if you have a funnel, where someone can convert multiple times down your funnel to actually see all the different conversions. Just by default, LinkedIn is going to show you the conversions column. And you can go to break down and break it down by each individual conversion. But I found a way I like even more. In the conversion value. When you're setting it up. You get to tell LinkedIn how much you think each conversion is worth? Well, if I had a two step funnel, something like a webinar, and then that triggers a phone call. What I'll do is, if someone signs up for the webinar, I'm going to say that's worth one cent. And then if someone signs up for the phone call, I'm going to say that's worth $1. And then when you go to your columns, and you look at just all of your performance by conversions, you'll see one column that is your conversion value. And let's say it says something like $3.12 cents, you can look at that intuitively and say, oh, that means 12 people converted on the webinar, and then three of them turned into phone calls to our sales team. So that's a cool little hack that we've found when you have multi step funnels that you want to track quickly and easily. All right, I've got the episode resources coming up for you. So stick around. 24:03 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 24:14 All right down in the show notes links, you'll see the YouTube video about how to install event tracking by Joe Martinez. And then you'll also see the guide the blog post on B2Linked.com that walks you through how to do it if you want a written guide as well. If you're new to LinkedIn Ads, or have a colleague who's getting trained or something like that, definitely check out the course the links down below as well. And that's on LinkedIn Learning. So it's either $25 or free, depending on your subscription to LinkedIn. Also look down at your podcast player right now. Make sure that subscribe button is hit so that you never miss another episode like this. And if you liked it, please do rate and review. And if you do leave a review I'm going to shout you out. And then of course with any suggestions, feedback, or just telling me how you don't like gingers. Email Podcast@B2Linked.com and we'd love to hear from you. With that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources: Ep 26: Why LinkedIn Ads Are So Expensive? LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Show Transcript: Q4 on LinkedIn Ads, what I affectionately call the yearly bloodbath. Winter is coming, prepare yourselves. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. So Q4 of 2020 is coming up. And every year, it's an absolute bloodbath on LinkedIn Ads, I'm going to walk you through the market forces that cause it. And then what you can do about it, as an advertiser. We'll also take this opportunity to dive into the seasonality effects during the whole rest of the year. So strap in, and let's get to it. Highlighting a couple reviews here on the podcast. David Rosendahl on LinkedIn actually put this in a LinkedIn story. And I had to grab it as an example. He said, "Hey, I'm out on a bike ride listening to that podcast, I just took a screenshot of. If you're into LinkedIn ads, and you're looking to run them more effectively for yourself or your company, listen to this podcast. Man, it's a good one, a good show. The guy knows what he's talking about. And I highly recommend it. So go check it out." David, thanks so much for the kind review and shouting that out publicly. It means the world to me. A user by the name of Notdeeplyreligious, which I giggled about, left a review that said, "Easy to understand and generous with the info. I've watched my share of YouTube videos on LinkedIn Ads, and even took a Udemy course, listening to AJ has been by far the most helpful. He's clear and detailed, but not overwhelmingly. So it's obvious. He enjoys his craft, and feels it's his duty to impart valuable knowledge. I'm sure it helps attract clients, and why not, I appreciate a master who enthusiastically spreads the word, he certainly helped me". Notdeeplyreligious, I can tell that you go super into things, I'm so glad you've been diving into Udemy and YouTube to get info on LinkedIn Ads. And I'm so grateful to be a part of that knowledge seeking. So thanks for leaving such a great review. And to everyone else, I want to feature you here. So please do go and leave a review for the podcast. And with that being said, let's hit it. 2:16 Seasonality So first, I think we need to define what seasonality is. And what this is, is over the course of the year, there are a whole bunch of different market forces that will change your advertising and really noticeable ways certain of these forces will change the costs. So it sometimes the year your cost might be higher, and others might be lower. You might also find that certain times of the year, your engagement rates go up and down, and maybe even your lead quality can shift. And all of this is an interplay between supply and demand. So we're going to be taking you back to Econ 101 right now. But for our purposes here, when we talk about supply, we're talking about the traffic on LinkedIn, the supply of people logging into the platform. And then when we talk about demand, we're talking about advertiser demand, meaning us as advertisers bidding for that traffic and trying to win. So the way it works is that when demand stays the same, which means that nothing has changed for advertisers, we're still the same number of us. And we're still bidding the same amounts. But then supply increases, like more people coming in logging into LinkedIn, then prices for everyone fall. And then conversely, if the number of people on LinkedIn stays the same, so we don't have new people coming and spending more time on there. That's our supply. But we have more advertisers coming onto the platform. That's our demand, that's going to cause costs to increase. And when I started bt linked about six years ago, I watched a period of about four years where prices stayed relatively the same, which was fantastic. I got to tell people for four years that the average cost per click on LinkedIn was between $6 to $9, depending on competition. And we did see a lot of new advertisers during that time, so of course, there was additional demand. But I think what balanced it out is the supply, the members on LinkedIn. People were coming to it in droves. They were finding more and more benefit in being on LinkedIn. So they would come in larger groups and then they would spend more time, which is creating additional ad inventory for everyone. And so even though advertisers were coming in finding a lot of success on the platform, then they weren't paying more because the users were really balancing that out. And then in late 2018, came the 35% price hike that we saw with the advent of objectives. If you want to learn more about that, listen to Episode 26. That goes all into why LinkedIn Ads are so expensive. And then add to that the release of automated bidding and the ridiculously high suggested bid ranges. And basically since then, we've seen costs really go on an upward trend. Costs on LinkedIn are higher than they've ever been, and are climbing quickly. And this is on a platform that everyone was already complaining, even when it was brand new, that it was too expensive to begin with. So you as advertisers, if you understand the market forces that are at play on the platform, you can take advantage of it and counter those forces to make sure that you're always getting the very best performance, no matter what time of year. The biggest part of seasonality that I have to bring up is what happens during the November and December timeframe in North America. We found that in North America, which makes up the majority of LinkedIn advertisers on the platform, that November and December are a total bloodbath. Starting from about Thanksgiving in the US all the way through the end of the year, there's a whole bunch of market forces that really make this not an optimal time to be advertising. What you'll notice is, number one, there's a bunch of big brands that are pushing really hard to blow all their budget because it's a use it or lose it budget. So they have till the end of the year, it also happens to be the end of a quarter, and the end of a month, which are all big times where marketers and sales folks are getting a lot of pressure. And what this does is it increases advertiser competition, which in our little econ graph here is the demand. And so we see costs per click rise, cost per click cost per impression, whatever it is you're measuring, competition goes up. And so prices go up. At the same time this is happening, we see people checking out to go on vacation. And what that does is it decreases our supply inventory. People aren't logging into the platform or spending as much time on it. And so since your inventory decreases, and people are bidding just as high, if not higher, that makes costs per click rise even more. So with these two forces, you'll see your costs per click going up significantly, and your traffic dropping. But then there are two really big nails in the coffin for me, that happened on the other side, once you land a lead, most of your customers budgets will be spent and spoken for through the whole rest of the year. So people really aren't considering new solutions. And of course, sometimes this works in your favor, because someone has a use it or lose it type of budget. And they have some leftover, and they're looking to make a purchase before the end of the year very quickly. So sometimes you can still get deals during this time. But for the most part, this is really depressed, it leads to people being less interested so your perceived lead quality goes down, your conversion rates go down. And then every sales team will tell you the same thing every year, all the leads that you generate in November and December will all say "Let's pick up the conversation after the first of the year". And of course, everyone has good intentions with it, but no one's going to remember what salesperson they were talking to a month and a half ago or six weeks ago so they tend to forget about your company and so your overall lead quality goes down. So during this period, you have costs that go up, and then lead quality that goes down. So if you're tracking what your cost per sales, qualified lead is or your ROI, it's looking real bad during this little period here. So because of all these market forces, it basically means that you'll likely see your costs go way up, sometimes 40 to 50%, just during these two months. But don't be discouraged, all is not lost. Right after the sponsor break, we'll dive into how you can take advantage of this for the best performance of the whole year. The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. 8:37 If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you, B2Linnked is the agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $130 million on LinkedIn Ads, and no one outperforms us on getting you the lowest cost per lead. We're official LinkedIn partners, and we don't have a sales team. So you'll deal with a LinkedIn Ads expert from day one, Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to chat about your campaigns. Or Heck, send it via Pony Express. Our mission, no matter how you get in touch, is to make you look like the hero. 9:09 Best Time of the Year for LinkedIn Advertisers All right, let's jump into the best time of the year for LinkedIn advertisers. So I'll throw this out. I am deeply religious. So I do say this as a joke, but January 2 every year is my Christmas. And that's because all of those market forces that made November and December just a terrible time to run LinkedIn Ads, that entire script flips when you jump into January. Now I say January 2, just to talk about after the first of the year. But in 2021. This year, it's going to be January 4, because the second is actually a Saturday and obviously, no one's going to be going to work. But here are the market forces that make January so amazing. It's the beginning of a new month, a new quarter and a new year. So there's going to be low demand from other advertisers meaning less competition and some of the cheapest clicks that you'll get the entire year. Then on the lead quality side, you have this low cost to get in with people, but now people are back from vacation. They have new budgets, fresh initiatives, they're thinking about making a big difference for the year. So they're going to come on LinkedIn and spend more time, they're gonna be a lot more interested in new and disruptive ideas and products and services. This will be the time of some of your highest conversion rates of the whole year. And then as soon as your sales team gets a hold of these leads, nothing is on their calendar yet, because it's brand new in the year, they haven't gotten slammed yet. So you'll see high lead quality and high conversion rates from like an MQL to an SQL kind of stage. Lots of people are thinking, hey, it's a new year new you. So they'll spend a lot of time on LinkedIn potentially looking at new roles, looking just to make a big difference in their life, along with their new year's resolutions. So January, in short, it's amazing. The lowest costs, highest conversion rates, highest lead quality. So my recommendation every year is to prepare everything in like early to mid December, so that you're all ready for a January 2 launch. And of course, you want to hit it really hard in January with really high performing creatives. So you might even run a little bit of a test in maybe late November or early December, just until you find some creative and an offer that you know is going to work, that way there's so little risk when you hit the go button on January 4. And of course, we have to mention what I call the summer lull, we see something similar to the November and December lull. But it's during the summer in the US. Presumably This is due to people taking vacations and mentally checking out, which is going to decrease your supply and if all advertiser demand stays constant, that's going to raise prices. And of course, us as advertisers, we are still advertising during that time, we may go out on vacations here and there. But the demand is going to stay pretty constant. But with that supply decrease, obviously that's going to bump your costs up a little bit. And then on the sales side with these mentally checked out people. And of course the example that you will probably see all the time, I need to loop Carla in here, but she's in the Bahamas this week. So let's push this to next. Those tend to lead to lower lead quality and depressed conversion rates from like an MQL to an SQL stage. In general, the way it looks on the platform is Q1 is going to be the best of the whole year, Q2 looks pretty good. It's kind of riding on the success of Q1, Q3 is pretty good other than just that summer lull. And then Q4 is great until Thanksgiving in the US happens. 12:45 What You Can Do So let's talk about what you can do about this to combat these. Well, you can plan to slow down your spend in November and December to compensate. We have a ton of clients who either scale way back during those months, or even fully pause their accounts after Thanksgiving, and then push all of that budget to go hard at the beginning of January. For those of you who've been listening for a while this won't come as any shock. But you should not be using automated bidding, or bidding within the recommended bid range, unless you absolutely have to. Automated bidding starts making sense when your click through rates are like three times the benchmark average. And you should only be bidding up if you're not getting enough traffic. So if you have a really competitive audience, and lower bids aren't cutting it, then yeah, you'll probably start to creep into the recommended bid range. But the reason why I'm telling you to avoid these things is automated bidding is where LinkedIn basically sets its own price. It's kind of like give us your wallet, and then we'll take whatever out of it we think we need, which basically makes everyone bid really high. And as the majority of advertisers are bidding high, it pushes the price of the auction up for everyone else too. And then those unrealistically high suggested bid ranges, those are hurting everyone too because it pushes competition up way faster than it should. As new advertisers jump in and they're taking the platform suggestions because they don't know better yet.Advertisers who spend inefficiently, don't get a return on their investment, then they end up cutting their spend for next month. And then LinkedIn sees them as a turned advertiser, someone who came in, tried and quit. So having the majority of advertisers using the default automated bidding, or bidding within the suggested bid ranges, even on small budgets. This hurts everyone, LinkedIn included, and it makes us all pay more. Just this morning, I was looking at graphs of some clients that we've been running some very large accounts over the last four years. And we noticed that in 2017 and 2018, we saw costs really rise in November in December, and then in 2019, it stayed flat and even improved. And this is because we took our own advice. During that time, we bid all the way down to the minimums, we bid all the way down to the floor, and we pulled budget back. And we saved that budget for the beginning of Q1. This podcast is coming out in mid October. So I'm giving you some time to prep, make sure you let your boss know, you let the CEO know, you let the board know that you're going to try to go light over the next couple months, and then push hard at the beginning of January. And of course, 2020 and 2021 will likely be very affected by COVID. So it may be very different than in past years. I know with this year, the summer travel season in the US and pretty much everywhere else, there weren't nearly as many people traveling because there wasn't anywhere to go or anything to do that didn't involve being shoulder to shoulder with people. And so the summer lull was likely a little bit smoother than it normally would be. And I do think that COVID will likely affect the 2021 summer as well, unless a miracle happens and everyone's vaccinated and the world goes back to not crazy times. This year holidays in North America, we'll likely see the same depression. But maybe we'll see fewer people traveling and more people spending time on LinkedIn. So maybe the effect will be a little bit less. But we'll see. I'll start running these analyses in February. Thanks for sticking around. I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 16:33 Resources All right, I've got a few great resources for you. For more on LinkedIn pricing, definitely go back and listen to Episode 26. That one will give you the best look into pricing on LinkedIn that I've seen yet. If you're just now getting into LinkedIn Ads and could use a course, go and check out my course on the LinkedIn Learning platform called LinkedIn Advertising. It is incredibly detailed and incredibly inexpensive compared to if you were just to bring me in to train your team one on one. You will not be disappointed by the either $25 are free if you have a premium account on LinkedIn. If you liked what you heard today, make sure you hit the subscribe button on your podcast player right now. Don't worry, I'll wait. Yeah, just kidding. Make sure you rate and review the podcast as well. So leave a review and I'll be happy to shout that out. And then also with any suggestions you have for the show any topics you'd like covered or any questions you've got reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week, cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources:Split test calculator Ep 07 - LinkedIn Ads Account Organization Ep 15 - Benchmarking Your LinkedIn Ads LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Show Transcript: Bro, do you even test? Yeah, we're talking AB testing your LinkedIn Ads today. Let's do this. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. LinkedIn Ads provides the absolute best testing ground for learning about your audience and your account. No other ad platform can match it. And over the years, we here at B2Linked have honed our account structure and testing strategy. And I'm about to reveal it all for free. The only thing I ask in return is that you ship me bottles of your local root beer. I'm just kidding. It's truly free. But I wouldn't hate on receiving root beer shipments. In the news, LinkedIn launched its new site redesign on desktop. And this probably went out to a third or a fourth of all LinkedIn members. So chances are that most of you by now have it. But I'll tell you, it's not a huge departure. It's very much a redesign, but not necessarily adding any new functions or really changing anything, except making the whole background gray and having rounded buttons instead of more squared off buttons. I'm kind of ambivalent on the whole thing. But I do appreciate how it doesn't really look like Facebook all that much anymore. It sure seemed like they were going pretty Facebook there for a while. Along with this release, LinkedIn released LinkedIn stories. So again, maybe most of you who are listening right now have this, I was part of that initial test group with LinkedIn stories. But quite frankly, I'm really scared to actually hit the button and release my first story, because I haven't ever used them on Snapchat on Instagram, or anything else. Stories is totally a new format of sharing for me. And I'm really excited to see how business to business does these well, because I really don't even know where to start. Maybe by the time you hear this, I'll have created my first story. The part that I'm most excited about with LinkedIn stories is if you listened to Episode 16, with Ting Ba from LinkedIn, she alluded to the fact that we were going to have stories first, and then we would have stories as an ad product. And every time I talked to someone at LinkedIn about stories, I asked them the same question, which was, is stories inventory exactly the same inventory as the newsfeed or does it have its own inventory? And the reason why I'm so curious about this is because when LinkedIn releases a new ad format that has its own inventory, what happens is that inventory all starts with zero competition, meaning a lot of times we get significantly cheaper traffic for sometimes a year or two. So I love getting new ad inventory. And sure enough, what I found out after stories released, this is its own inventory. So it starts with a fresh auction at zero competition. So as soon as these ads come out, man, I want to be the first one to launch one. I wanted to shout out a couple reviews here, both of them on Apple podcasts. Sydney&Marketing says, "It feels like cheating. There is so much valuable information that is shared. It feels like it's breaking the rules. His podcasts are beyond helpful." Sydney in marketing, thank you so much for leaving a very kind review. The next one is from Jaston on Apple podcasts as well. He says, "What a digital marketing podcast should be. The Golden Age of podcasts has arrived. And there are so many great marketing podcasts. But few are as valuable as AJ Wilcox's LinkedIn ads show. I have known and followed AJ for a number of years. And I was excited to hear that he had launched a podcast, especially on such an interesting topic as LinkedIn Ads. AJ is the pro of LinkedIn Ads. And so it just makes sense that he would find a way to easily communicate all the latest trends, info and insights. What I most appreciate about the podcast is that it jumps right into the applicable information around LinkedIn and applicable information around LinkedIn Ads. My favorite information that's been shared are LinkedIn Ads Roadmaps, Mommon LinkedIn Ads Media, Common LinkedIn Ads Performance Metrics, and the Best Ways To Get LinkedIn Ads To Perform. If you have interest in running LinkedIn Ads, then I highly recommend the podcast. If you are simply interested in hearing great discussions around digital media, then I think it has a lot of value. Thanks for the great podcast AJ." Now from the username Jaston. I know that this is Josh Aston, and he's the founder of above the Fold Digital. He's a fantastic senior marketer that totally understands the process from driving traffic all the way down to analytics and CRM integrations. He's the real deal. So Josh, thank you for the kind review. I also want to let you know that I regularly rope in the team here at B2Linked to pull research and help inform the topics that we bring up. So a big thank you to the B2Linked. I know AJ will Cox gets a lot of credit in the reviews and online. But this is very much a joint effort. So thank you to the whole team, I don't want you to think that I'm hogging it. All right, I want to feature you. So please do leave a review wherever you leave podcast reviews, Apple podcasts, Stitcher, anywhere, I'll find it and share it out and give you a shout. All right onto testing methodologies. Let's hit it. 5:23 Testing Approach Now when I say AB test, I actually don't mean testing in the same exact way that you would think a strict AB test is, I'm basically just talking about testing two things against each other. We try to do this in a smart way. So that we're comparing things that actually will tell us a result that we're looking for. And we try to keep the data as pure as we possibly can. I say this because one of my favorite AB tests, which isn't a pure AB test is where you test one offer against another offer. So let's say that you have a webinar coming up. And then you want to test that against a report or an E-book, you wouldn't call this a pure AB test, because both of these offers are very different. So you're going to have different imagery, different ad copy. But because the offer makes the biggest difference in your conversion rates, I still think this is super valuable. So if our clients have multiple different pieces of content or offers, that's probably the first test that we'll do. But then once we found a winning offer, we'll start doing pure A B tests. And these will be the same offer with ad versus ad. The first thing I like to test in the actual ad copy, if they're both going to the same offer, is intro vs. intro. And there are a few flavors here, you can have two different calls to action. So you can test which call to action gets people to take action. You can also test pain point against pain point, or motivation against motivation. And this can help you understand what your audience responds to best. What are they most motivated by? Is it fear based or aspirational? Is it statistics or clickbait, whatever it is, you can find that out with an intro vs. intro test. The next thing we'll test is headline vs. headline, I wouldn't do a headline vs. headline test until you've already tested your intro. Because that generally has the biggest effect on your click through rate. Then as soon as we see performance for an ad version starting to decline, then we'll do an image vs. image test where we take the best performing intro and headline and test two different images and see if we can find what kind of image catches people's attention best. And then let's say you settle on the best combination of intro, headline, and image. You could even go really advanced and do a landing page vs. landing page test, same ad copy going to two different landing page experiences. So you can test what elements of the page are getting people to convert better or worse. As you're doing these tests. Go back and listen to Episode 15 on benchmarks, because that's where you'll learn what benchmarks to watch for. You know, let's say you have two tests and one is outperforming the other, but if they're both performing below LinkedIn's average, then you might want to end the test early and scrap it. And there are several different metrics that you can watch to see how your ads and offers are doing. And I'll start from the least impactful metrics, and then we'll work towards the most important. What To Look For: 8:27 Impressions So the first is impressions. If you see that one ad is receiving more impressions than another, what that teaches you is basically what LinkedIn thinks of the ad. If both of your variations are getting a similar amount of impressions, then you know that both have a similar relevancy score. And so LinkedIn is giving them traffic evenly. LinkedIn doesn't see a big difference in click through rates. And that's okay. The next metric to watch is actually your click through rate. And this is how you can tell what ad copy and what motivations are good at getting the customer's attention. Again, if your click through rates are similar, let's say one is a 0.8% and is 0.75%, those are so close I wouldn't say oh, yeah, let's do whatever got 0.8%, they really could be similar. But if one is a 0.4% and one's a 1.2%, you've got a winner. Cost Per Click The next is watching your cost per click, because your cost per click really is a combination of both your audience competition, how your bidding, and how your ads are performing. And so especially across audiences, if you see significant changes in your cost per click, that teaches you something about how either that audience is responding to your ads, or the increased level of competition among different audiences. 9:48 Conversion Rate Next is your conversion rate. Your conversion rate is going to teach you how effective your offer is at getting people to take action. How attractive it is. We see really good conversion rates on LinkedIn of being 15% or higher. So compare that against your variations and see how you're doing and and which one wins. Cost Per Lead The next is your cost per lead. And that is how much of an outlay and cost it requires to generate a lead, a conversion, an opt in, really whatever it is that you're going for. If you're spending a lot, or have been spending for a long time, then you could measure your ad differences by cost per lead, and tell which one is better at getting people to convert. So if you are testing things like ad copy, image, someone's motivation. Click Through Rate The things that you're probably paying attention to, are going to be the click through rate. And in order to get enough data about your click through rates to make sure that they are significant, we found that that's usually, at least if you're in North America, you're usually going to be spending between $300 to $1,000 across those two ad variations. Make sure that you get enough volume so the results really are significant here. If you're paying attention to the cost per click across your tests, you probably want to spend about the same amount that same $300 to $1,000, but make sure that this goes over at least one calendar week. And that's because costs per click can vary significantly by day. So you don't want to have just a partial week and then have a messed up data set. And your cost per click will also vary as your ad performance adjusts over time as well. Now, if you've got larger budgets, you're probably going to be paying more attention to the conversion rate. And this is where I highly suggest that you get to because the conversion rate of your offer is a much better predictor of how well your your ads are going to be performing than any of your ad copy. It's deeper in the funnel and therefore more impactful. Your conversion rate is really going to vary based off of the type of conversion that you're promoting or call to action that you're asking for. If you do what we recommend, which is starting with a content offer, something like free gated content, you will likely average between about 10 to 15% conversion rates. And those conversion rates at average costs per click within the first thousand dollars in ad spend, you should have a good feel for an asset, whether it's an ultra high converter, or a total dog or somewhere in the middle. And then by the time you've spent about $5,000, you'll likely have statistical significance on your cost per conversion, and your conversion rates all the way to the 95% confidence interval. And this should tell you whether that offer is really hitting the mark or not. And if you should do more like that. Also, this many leads should give you a pretty decent feel with how the sales team is measuring and responding to the lead quality. And it should be a high enough quantity of leads that your conversion rates from let's say, marketing qualified lead to sales qualified lead actually become meaningful. And of course, remember that the value behind LinkedIn ads is in the lead quality. So ultimately, how they result in those lower lead stages is really what matters. Now, if you're pushing people right to what I call a high friction asset, like right to a demo request or a free trial, or talking to sales, or buying something that will likely average somewhere between about 1.5% to a 4% conversion rate. And because that conversion rate is so much lower than if you were going to be releasing content, you'll have to spend significantly more to reach the same levels of significance. So keep that in mind, you might spend $5,000 to reach significance around content assets. And you might have to spend $25,000, to get the same thing around demo requests. 13:55 Statistical Significance Now I've been talking about statistical significance and it really is important to define it for our purposes here. What it is, is a statistical measure that's mathematically complex. And the output is kind of confusing. One time I built it manually in Excel and now I only use online calculators. But what it really boils down to is the difference between your two test variations that you're running is unlikely to happen by chance. Or in other words, that the winner of your test is actually the winner and not just a statistical anomaly. For AB tests in digital marketing, I use a 95% confidence interval, which is pretty high, but it's not the highest you can go. And what that would mean is we're 95% certain that the winner of the tests, the one that appears to be the winner is actually the winner. So if you need to make decisions faster, or maybe you have a lot less data, you can get to statistical significance faster. If you use something lower like a 90% confidence interval. If you want to calculate this, there are hundred online calculators if you just Google it. But my favorite so far is splittestcalculator.com. And if you scroll down to the show notes, you'll see a link to that. It makes this process super straightforward. So if you're testing the conversion rates between, let's say, two different assets, what you do is you take variation, one's number of clicks, and then you input variation two's number of clicks, and then down below, you put variation one's number of conversions, and then variation two's number of conversions. When you hit calculate, it'll tell you the conversion rate, and whether or not it's significant to that 95% confidence interval. And statistical significance is really hard for me to say. So from here on out, I'm just going to call it stat SIG. That'll be a lot easier on my tongue. So if you're testing the stat SIG around your click through rates, just put impressions in that same calculator instead of clicks, and then put clicks instead of conversions. The surprising way that stat SIG works is that your results will oscillate in and out of statistical significance quite regularly. So you want to make sure that you don't call the test too early. To keep from doing that, you may want to set an amount of spend that you're comfortable with as part of the test. And in statistics, we call that a horizon. So then go and check for significance as soon as you hit the horizon. And that should help protect your results, making sure you don't choose the wrong variation. And right now, I'm thinking through a way to have a live significance calculator for our LinkedIn Ads, so we can track when results become significant. And when they've oscillated out. So if anyone's done anything like that, reach out, and let me know I'd love to chat with you about that. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into exactly how we structure and account for testing. 16:52 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. 17:01 If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you, B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $130 million on LinkedIn Ads, and everyone you talk to here is a LinkedIn Ads expert. So you'll get the very best advice with no sales pitch. We're official LinkedIn partners, and we're the only LinkedIn Ads agency confident enough to share all of our secrets publicly on a podcast. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2linked.com, to chat about your campaigns, or heck send a postcard, our mission is always to make you look like the hero. Alright, let's jump into a bit more of a b testing as well as all reveal our secret sauce and how we structure accounts for testing. 17:43 There are a whole litany of AB tests that you can run. So depending on what it is that you're testing, here's what you can expect that to affect. So if you're running an image test, expect that to alter your click through rate. So if you're testing images, one against another, don't watch for the difference in your conversion rate, your conversion is so far away from the image that you probably won't see that much of a correlation. So watch your click through rate there. Images are much better at getting someone's attention, leading to a click. The next is if you are doing an intro or a headline test, because this is ad copy, it will very much affect your click through rate. But depending on the call to action, and how valuable you write the ad copy to be, you can actually affect conversion rates from here. So maybe test against your click through rate as well as your conversions. If you're testing differences on your landing page, or even on your LinkedIn lead gen form, you'll see those results directly affecting your conversion rates. And then if you are testing your offers, the offer itself really permeates through the entire funnel. Because a really attractive offer can make for some really attractive ad copy, teaching you about click through rates. Because a really good offer is really easy to write really good ad copy around. So you'll see that effect in your click through rates. But then, of course, the offer really is what it is that you're calling someone to action on, you're telling them this is what I want you to do. And so that will also influence your conversion rates. Back when I used to run a lot of Google Ads, I ran quite a few of what I called AAB tests. So what I would do is come up with an A and a B variation. But then I would launch an exact copy of the A. So there were technically three ads in that ad group, but two of them were identical. And the reason that I did this is because I could look at the difference between my identical ads. And that would help me understand how much variance I could expect in my data. So for instance, if click through rates were close, then I could assume that measuring my AA against my B would be a worthwhile pursuit. But if click through rates were very different, I knew I really couldn't trust the difference between my A and my B nearly as much. Now I'm ashamed to say that I don't do very many AAB tests on LinkedIn. So if you are currently running these, please reach out and tell me about it. I would love to see those results. All right on to the exciting stuff. 20:14 B2Linked Approach So what I'm about to present to you is the official patent pending. Patent is really not pending. The B2Linked approach to an account setup. We've honed the SAM account testing strategy over the years and it has worked really well for our AB testing and pulling insights out. What we do is we take the target audience, and we break them into small micro segments. Go back and listen to Episode Seven, if you haven't already, and dive into how that works. Then what we do is we launched the same A and B variations into each of those separate campaigns. So each campaign is running its own AB test. But it's the same AB test that's running in every other campaign across the account, get it? Now, because the whole account is running the same two ads, at any point in time we can roll all the results up to the whole account level and look at the difference between A and B variations, totally ignoring the fact that these are all across multiple audience segments. At any point in time, you're only 35 seconds away from getting this data by hitting export from campaign manager, throwing into Excel, creating a pivot table, and boom you're looking at it. And because each campaign is running the same ads, we can measure the difference between each of those campaigns being just the difference in the audience. So it's an AB test of audience vs. audience. So you might find something like hey, the click through rates are higher with director level than they are with VP level folks. Or maybe cost per click is lower when we target the audience by job function than with job title. And then you could use those learnings to find out how you get more traffic or cheaper traffic or better quality of leads. You can roll that data up to the account level at any time at any granularity and find insights fast. You can roll all of your similar types of targeting up, you can roll all of your similar sonorities up to learn about them, the world is your oyster. And then of course, each of those individual campaigns as they spend and amass data, you'll eventually be able to draw conclusions about them individually. So how this targeting type and this segment of the population converts to this exact offer. So really, I told you that this episode was all about AB testing. But the way I'm describing it to you is actually setting up a series of AB tests, that's AB tests around your ads, and AB tests around your audiences. And simultaneously running a giant multivariate test of ads against individual audience micro segments. Boom, talk about under promise over deliver, whoo, give myself a high five. If you are a total stats geek, and you're geeking out with me on this, then I'm sure you're going to be lured in by this concept of you can tell LinkedIn you want to rotate creative evenly, instead of optimizing to the best click through rate. So fight that urge. The reason why this is is it's really a misnomer in the way that LinkedIn presents it. It's not going to show both ads evenly to that audience. What it's going to do is enter them both into the auction evenly. But of course, LinkedIn is going to give different relevancy scores to each of those ads, meaning that the one that performs higher is going to get shown more, it's going to win more auctions, and it's going to win them at a lower price. And the poor performer won't show as often. So if you select this option, you'll find that even though you're rotating evenly, you still end up with a mismatch in your impressions and your clicks. So I call the rotate evenly option, the charge me more and show me less button. I don't like pushing that button. But there is a solution for this issue coming. LinkedIn announced that they're going to have a split test option coming where you'll effectively be able to split test your different ads against each other, and it actually will split them 50/50. I keep asking LinkedIn how this works with the auction and how it avoids falling into the same trap as the rotate ads evenly, but no one's gotten back to me on that one yet. I figure it's probably implemented the same way that Facebook's is because Facebook has an A B testing option as well. But I haven't found anyone who can tell me how Facebook pulls it off, either. So if any of you know reach out, I would love to hear how this interacts with the auction. All right, I've got the episode resources coming up for you right now. So stick around. 24:51 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 25:02 Resources Alright, got some great resources for you. The first is that split test calculator. It's called splittestcalculator.com. It's a great one to go and pop your your stats from your campaigns into and see if they're significant or not. The next is, if you haven't listened to it Episode 15, all about benchmarking, you'll see that option that link right in the show notes below. And you'll also see a link to Episode Seven, all about account structure. This will give you a little bit more insight into how we structure and account for manageability and for testing. And if you're new to LinkedIn Ads, or you have a colleague, who is point them towards the LinkedIn ads course on LinkedIn Learning. There's a link to that below as well and it's a great intro course into LinkedIn. And because it's on LinkedIn Learning, it is ultra cheap. It is literally 1/24th for the cost. If you had me come and train your team on exactly the same material. Make sure you look down at your podcast player and hit that subscribe button, make sure that you've got every one of these episodes coming at you. And please do rate the podcast. And then if you leave us a review, I would love to shout you out as well. And then finally, if you have any ideas or questions or topics that you'd want to cover here on the podcast, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week, cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources:New! View your company page followers. New update to the playbook on targeting from LinkedIn LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Show Transcript: Here are five more common LinkedIn Ads mistakes. Are you making any of them? Just fix them quickly, and your boss will never know. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! One of our most popular episodes was the top five mistakes that LinkedIn advertisers make. That was Episode 18 in case you missed it. Make sure you go and listen to it is super valuable. Well, we tend to see a lot of mistakes happening so we put together five more. Again, in no particular order, you may be making some of these and others you might not. So let's jump into it. First, though, in the news, LinkedIn rolled out a new bidding interface. And it's not out to everyone, at least at the time of recording here, but it's on its way rolling out to everyone. And you'll notice it still defaults to auto bidding, but now that's called maximum delivery. And then within parentheses, it says auto bidding. The other option is manual bidding. And for each of these options, you can select the optimization action that you would like LinkedIn to optimize towards. So that is your clicks, leads, just impressions. And it's been interesting to test these out, but we still see that we get the best results from either auto bidding, if we have high click through rates, or bidding manual, enhanced CPC and bidding low if it's below. There was a great announcement that I'm super excited about. You can see the link in the show notes below. But now LinkedIn allows you to view your company page followers. And when you go and check that out, it will tell you the month that that person became a company page follower. So I'm really excited to use this data to visualize the growth of our company page. And I hope you are as well. Episode 31, if you remember, was an interview with Ryan Mcinnis from LinkedIn about the Brand and Demand playbook that they released. Well, they also released an updated version of the Targeting playbook. You'll also find that link there in the show notes that you can go and download that and check it out. I have kind of a mixed reaction to this one. I really like that when they updated it, they called the seniority that they call senior, they actually labeled it what it is, senior individual contributor. The vast majority of LinkedIn advertisers get tripped up by senior because they think oh, senior managers, senior directors, senior VPS. That's not what it's talking about. It's actually referencing someone who's not entry level, but not yet a people manager. It's exactly what they're saying. It's an individual contributor, that they call senior for some reason. So that was really cool to see them point out. But I was put off a little bit because going through there, you'll see that they include a recommendation for enabling audience expansion. And if you've listened to more than like three episodes, you know my stance on audience expansion and how I think it's utter and complete garbage. So maybe research it and take that advice with a grain of salt, realizing that some is probably good, some might not be so good. But you'll want to make that call. It's probably worth checking out at least what LinkedIn recommends. What LinkedIn recommends for targeting is a lot of what we recommend too if you've been listening. A shout out to Ron Halpern, who left a review for us, and he says, "One stop shop for all LinkedIn ad info. This podcast is my secret weapon at work. It keeps me up to date and current on things that make me invaluable. Thanks to AJ, his passion and his ability to break down the very info around marketing on LinkedIn. If you're looking to run ads on this platform, you must listen to AJ. The performance benchmarks he shares make it worth it 100% on their own, but he is so ridiculously abundant with his knowledge, even a hardened pro would find his podcast valuable." Ron, I'm so glad that me and the team can be here to be your secret weapon at work. We're super happy to superpower you and sincerely thanks for leaving such a stellar review and sharing it out to the world. That's so incredibly meaningful to us. The next is from BarrettDastrup, who says, "Can't believe this info is free. I've been listening consistently for less than a week and have already applied multiple bits of advice I've picked up from AJ. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for just getting to the point and packing this time with only the useful information. no fluff here. Love it." Barrett, I'm so glad you appreciate that no fluff style. Personally, I just can't stand content where it feels like they're trying to hold stuff back or they themselves don't have a deep enough understanding to go deep. So I'm so glad that you appreciate that as well. That's definitely our style. Okay, I totally want to feature you. So make sure you leave a review on any podcast player that you use, and I'll totally give you a shout. And if you don't want to be shouted out publicly, well instead just tell your friends at work about the show privately or leave a review with an anonymous name. Okay, with that being said, let's hit it. 4:54 Wrong Objective Again in no particular order, one of the biggest mistakes that we see is people selecting the wrong objective. Last week's episode was Episode 34, all about objectives. So make sure you go and listen to that to go a little bit deeper here. But at a high level, when you're presented with LinkedIn objectives, and you see something like oh conversions, and you think, yeah, I'm going for conversions, and you select that option, I would totally understand where you're coming from. Unfortunately, LinkedIn is usually optimizing for max, and not for cheapest or most efficient. What this means is, if you're optimizing for conversions, LinkedIn is going to go out and bid as high as it needs to, to try to get the most amount of conversions. And they're not optimizing for what we see most advertisers care about, which is getting the right volume, but not at crazy costs. So go and listen to last week's episode about objectives to dive deeper into them. And it's really helpful to understand what you think you're optimizing towards, versus what LinkedIn actually is optimizing towards, or at least attempting to. The one that really seems to trip people up is the lead generation objective. Because everyone goes in and goes, yeah, I'm generating leads, that's what I'm looking to do so they click that, just to find out that when they create the campaign and start creating ads, that can't send traffic to their website, because lead generation as an objective, ropes you into only doing the native lead generation form ads. So they're definitely worth understanding at a deeper level. And do make sure that you put in the work to understand what each of the objectives do, so that you can ensure that you're selecting the proper one. And if your goal really is to spend all of your budget and you don't care about efficiency, then the objectives that LinkedIn gives, you actually should line up very nicely. But if your goal is efficiency, you'll probably end up using an objective differently than LinkedIn would recommend. 6:49 Wrong Size of BudgetThe next big mistake here in our list is advertising with the wrong size of budget. And we covered budget in Episode 19 really deeply, so go have a listen to that. But this really goes both ways. Advertisers with too large of a budget, and advertisers with way too small of one. The most common here is we regularly see advertisers who read our recommendations of you know, budgets of $5,000 a month, and say, "Well, I don't really have that kind of budget, but I'm gonna give it a shot anyway." And of course, you're dealing with small sample sizes here, so some tend to get lucky and they'll close a deal in a very small amount of spend, or they'll happen to get a really high conversion rate with just a few clicks. But most don't really get lucky like that. And just remember that the real value of LinkedIn is in the lead quality, which really isn't measurable from the platform itself. To adequately test the lead quality, you've got to get these leads into your CRM and compare them against other lead sources. So that you can tell that, yes, LinkedIn ads are generating traffic that are so high quality, that even though we have to pay three to five times more for each lead, they're definitely worth at least three to five times more to me. We talked to a lot of people who are saying, let's advertise for a month, and then we'll see if the return on investment is there. And I always have to stop them and say, well, you're not going to see a return on your investment after one month when your sales cycle is six to 10 months or even 15 months or longer. So same warning, if you go in with too small of a budget, or too tight of a timeframe that you hope to see results in, you'll probably be a little bit disappointed. But what about the other side? What about having too large of a budget? Usually, what happens if your budget is too large, you'll end up just paying too much for traffic. And then later, when you do your analysis, LinkedIn will look really inefficient. And you'll end up cutting the budget anyway. The way that this works is if you're using auto bidding, LinkedIn is going to look at your massive budget and say, "Oh, I'm going to bid really insanely high to make sure that I can spend all that budget to this audience." But if you're bidding really intelligently, let's say you're using manual bidding, you'll still likely end up bidding really high manually, just to make sure that you can spend your budget. And as you know, as your click costs go up, so do your costs per lead. And the channel will end up looking really inefficient. At some point in the ecosystem in the in the bidding auction environment, you end up passing this point of diminishing returns, where LinkedIn will keep charging you more for each click. But, it won't when you additional traffic volume in the auction, it won't get you additional impressions, you're just paying more for each individual impression. So I'm a big fan of starting out small start on smaller budgets. And then once you've nailed it, then worry about scaling it. And if you're scaling up from starting low, it's really easy to see that line of diminishing returns, as you said, "Oh I raised my bids from $14 to $14.50 and my cost per click went up by 50 cents, but I didn't get any additional impressions for that money." It's a lot simpler to do. So as you're pitching your boss or the board or the CEO, or whomever, make sure you ask for a budget, usually to start with between $5,000 and $10,000 per month, and then it's really easy to scale up or even back from there. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break. And then we'll dive into more common mistakes. 10:28 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. 10:37 If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you be to linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $130 million on LinkedIn Ads, and getting you the lowest costs and the highest quality leads is our focus. And we're the only media buying agency to be official LinkedIn partners, and we don't have a sales team. So you'll deal with a LinkedIn Ads expert from day one. Fill out the contact form on any page of b2b linkedin.com, to chat about your campaigns. Or Heck, send a carrier pigeon or smoke signal, our mission is always to make you look like the hero. Alright, let's jump into the next three common mistakes that you might be making on your LinkedIn Ads. 11:16 Not AB Testing One big mistake that we see people make is that they're not AB testing, they're not running any testing in their account. And for the record, this topic deserves its whole own episode. But just touching on it lightly. Because LinkedIn targeting is so tight, and so good, it enables you to get to run, like what I call silent focus groups. You can use your targeting to define very specific small, tight knit groups that all have something in common. And if you run the same ad, or the same two ads to these two separate audiences that are similar, but varied by one thing, it's really like getting to run a focus group. And you get to find out what your prospects like what they don't like, and what will get them to convert. So for instance, if I'm targeting marketing decision makers, I could make it really easy for myself and just target job function of marketing, and seniority of everything manager and above. And that's one campaign. It would be really easy to manage. Ceate two ads within it, and I'm done. But the problem with that is that you'll end up with all of the results that you get with nothing to compare it to. And if results are bad, or if they're good, you don't have any sort of levers that you can pull, or even learn from. So instead do something like a separate campaign for marketing managers, another for directors, another for marketing VPs, and a final one for CMOS. And you run the same two ads across them, and you find out, Oh, wow, it's less expensive to reach CMOS than we thought, or marketing managers aren't really resonating with our content. Those are the types of insights that you can get. A lot of times we see campaigns with only one ad running in them. And that sure seems like a waste, because it doesn't take a whole lot of effort to create one additional ad. And then you'll get to learn about what motivation is driving your potential customer, you can look at the cost per click, and the click through rate to understand how engaging each version of the ads are. And of course, down the line your conversion rates as well. So if you're only running one ad, you're missing that ability to have a second version to compare against. So you just kind of have to take whatever performance you get. And then we also see the opposite of this mistake, which is also a mistake of trying to test too much. Because LinkedIn is targeting ability is so good. Many are tempted to create way too many audiences or way too tight of targeting that creates tiny audiences. Now remember that every campaign has to have a minimum budget of $10 per day. So do the math at you know, at least $300 per month for each campaign and see if that would make you overspend your budget. So don't create so many campaigns that even at the minimums you're gonna overspend your budget. And even if you don't overspend your budget, you may end up getting so few results on each small campaign, that you don't really learn anything about those audience segments anyway. You're going to look at them at the end of the month and say, I can't take action on a campaign with only 20 clicks. So maybe I'll let this go for another month. And then that goes on adn on. My personal rule of thumb is to make sure that each campaign has a budget of at least $1,000 per month, at minimum. And that way, if I have a an introductory budget of $5,000 per month, I'm not going to go and create 20 campaigns. Along the same lines as over targeting. There's also running too many ads at a time. And of course there are exceptions to this rule. But in general, I would say don't be tempted to run more than two ads inside of any given campaign because if you do Some of your variations will get fully ignored. And then I wonder why would you even worry about creating variations that will just get labeled with a poor relevancy score, and they'll never see the light of day. They'll never get enough data to actually compare anything. So if you run two at a time, you'll always get enough data across both of those variations to at least get a flavor of what's going on. We covered this in Episode 29, about Ad saturation. But if you have more than two ads in a campaign, it will cause your campaigns to be able to be shown to the more active members, more often. Which sounds good, except what you'll end up doing is fully saturating the most active users of LinkedIn, and then not giving proper coverage to everyone else. But if you're always running two at a time, you're going to saturate pretty evenly. 15:48 Targeting Too Broadly The next mistake we see is targeting too broadly. And there's a couple different variations of this, there's where your audience size is too large, or your targeting is too broad, and you're going to be getting less qualified people in there. We'll tackle that one first. So if you're targeting too broadly, it's probably because when you were setting up your audiences, you were feeling this FOMO or fear of missing out, because you were looking at the targeting options and thinking, Oh, well, we'll be missing out on that one lone diamond in the rough, if we don't include the adjacent department, to the people that we're actually trying to target. In my mind, I see the these like, like concentric circles, or even a Venn diagram, where your most core audience is the very center, and they're the ones that you should fully concentrate on. And then once you've fully covered your most core, the highest impact users, then you can start looking at ways to branch out and reach a few more people that way, I'm sure we all have a story where we got some golden lead from someone who, when we looked at them on LinkedIn, they didn't fit the targeting criteria that we would usually call the perfect customer. But try to overcome that FOMO and instead, just worry about fully attacking your absolute core of prospects first, then once you've nailed it, you can scale out more broadly. On average, your core group of users will be the most efficient. So don't get FOMO and think, well yeah, I guess an accountant could be interested in my service. We see this one quite regularly, where we see audiences get built with too large of a size. And what happens here is you won't learn much about your audience, because you'll see all of those results coming into one large segment. And like we talked about before, if you're just looking at one large segment, there's nothing to compare against. So if we talk about that original example, targeting marketers, breaking them up by seniority, so that you can learn what levels of seniority interact with your content, or offers in certain ways. But it doesn't have to be seniority. You could break up by geography, or skill, company size, basically anything that you want to compare performance for, and then learn from the difference. You can break up your campaigns, I really like to see audiences between about 20,000 to 80,000. So if I have an audience that's much larger than that, I'll just find some arbitrary excuse to break it up into into two or three or five. So then I'm learning exactly what my ideal prospects like what they don't. And I get to learn from that silent focus group. Alright, I've got the episode resources coming up for you. So stick around. 18:37 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more?  AJ Wilcox, take it away. 18:47 So check out these articles that we talked about in the news section. The first is and these will be right for you in the show notes. There's a link where you can see how to view your company page followers. That's really cool going all the way back historically on the month and year that that person started following you. Super cool, I was excited for that. The next is the article on the new update to the playbook on targeting from LinkedIn. So definitely worth having a look to see if they're suggesting anything that you haven't considered before. And then if you're trying to learn LinkedIn Ads, or if you have a colleague, or a friend who is, check out the course that I did with LinkedIn Learning, I think it's only $25. Or it's free if you have a professional subscription to LinkedIn. And it's a really good intro to LinkedIn Ads. Take a look down at your podcast player and make sure that that subscribe button is all lit up. That way you'll make sure to not miss an episode. And please do rate the podcast and leave us a review. If you're willing to I'd love to shout you out. And as always, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with suggestions for episodes and topics, questions, or anything your little heart desires. With that being said we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources: Episodes we referenced: Ep 17 - LinkedIn Lead Gen Form Ads - Should You Use Them? Ep 26 - LinkedIn Ads are so expensive. Why is that? Article on MarketingLand LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Show Transcript: The objective that LinkedIn Ads is optimizing towards is not the objective you are optimizing for as an advertiser. And that means you can take advantage of it, if you know how the objectives work. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. So objectives on LinkedIn came out in early 2019. And we even had Episode Four with Amita Paul from LinkedIn about how LinkedIn is thinking about these objectives. And if you've managed Facebook Ads before, this was probably a very comfortable change. But I certainly did not appreciate the transition to objectives, as it added a lot more complexity to us as advertisers for not much additional value. But now that we've got experience with all of the objectives, we found the tips, tricks, and hacks on how to use them to our advantage, and I'm super excited to share them with you. Highlighting a couple of recent reviews, Neil Benson over on pod chaser says, "I took a Jays LinkedIn ads course on LinkedIn learning, and now I'm diving into his podcast to get deeper into the topics I need to learn to drive wildly successful LinkedIn ads campaigns. It's only been two days since AJ showed me how to create a campaign and I've spent $60 for eight leads so far. By the time I've listened to all the episodes, we'll know how many of those leads became paying students." Neil, thank you so much for leaving such an awesome review. That makes my little ginger heart so proud that you're seeing results already. So keep it up cheering you on. And then Christie McCabe, who is an Aussie from the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia. She works at an agency called Clevvi. And she says, "The go to podcasts for LinkedIn ad strategy. AJ has always been my go to resource for any questions related to LinkedIn advertising, I was so excited to see he launched a podcast so I can upscale while commuting, walking, etc. His podcast episodes are succinct, informative, and so giving valuable information and examples. AJ is genuine and helpful, sharing years of study and trials with us, which is so appreciated." Christy, you totally made my day. Thank you so much for saying such kind words. And if you found value by listening to the podcast, please do leave a review. And I want to help feature you. Okay, let's hit it. 2:21 So we're diving headlong into objectives here. And before we had objectives, what was it like? Well, we just had two bidding options, there was CPC bidding, cost per click, and there was CPM bidding, cost per thousand impressions. And if you look at anything that LinkedIn published, they would always say the same thing, "if your goal is getting impressions bid CPM, and if your goal is getting clicks, bid CPC", and it probably took me a little bit too long to figure this out. But that's really not good advice. And I ended up writing an article for MarketingLand back in 2015. And I've linked to it in the show notes. But it details the reason why this is actually really bad advice. And it it's because as a performance marketer, my goal is to get the lowest cost per result possible. And so I've done a lot of testing on different bid models, bidding high and low in both CPC and CPM. And I found that whatever bid model is that you're using whatever produces the lowest cost per click, also results in the lowest cost per impression, and vice versa. And the one factor here that all of this depends on which bid model you want to use, it's totally based off of your click through rate or your engagement rate. And so this is the concept that I developed where you've probably heard me say before, if your click through rates for sponsored content are over 1%, that's when you want to bid CPM. And when they're under that you want to bid CPC, but low. And regardless of what your actual goal or objective is, if you want the lowest cost per impression, or lowest cost per click, lowest cost per lead, you could follow this guideline, and that would give it to you. You've probably heard of eCPC or eCPM, and that means your effective cost per click or your effective cost per impression. And the way this works is if you're bidding for impressions, you can still see, in the dashboard, what your effective cost per click would be. So check this out and see no matter what objective and no matter what bid type you're using, go and take a look at the CPC column inside of campaign manager. You can even customize the columns and put CPC next to CPM and see if this holds true. And of course, you're all sophisticated marketers, so you might not be saying the same thing. But I hear a lot of people saying, well, cost per click isn't the end all be all. And it's true cost is important, but it's not the most important thing. But when we're comparing bid models, you have to assume that your conversion rate is going to stay the same and be held constant. And so if you do this, if you're looking to reduce your cost per lead, the way you do that is by reducing your cost per click. So we're always looking for any way to reduce the costs. And of course, still fill your budget. And inevitably, when you tell your LinkedIn rep, that this is what you're doing, you're trying to lower your cost per click, they will certainly tell you that you need to bid more competitively because that will give you a better conversion rate, and lead quality. And so I've done a lot of testing around this. I wanted to find out, if I bid really high did my lead quality increase? And if I bid really low, and I was scraping the bottom of the barrel for these leftover audience members, did my lead quality decrease? And in every case, we actually haven't found a difference in lead quality. And we've run a lot of data through this test. So I don't think that holds water. But of course, I'd love to hear from you if you've found differently. So then LinkedIn rolled out objectives in early 2019. It was actually in late 2018, where it was an open beta, that anyone could switch back to the old interface if they wanted. But when we saw this, the very same issues came up again. And that is, when you look at the objectives, LinkedIn says to pick the objective that you want to optimize for. And that's what they'll go after, they'll try to optimize for the same thing. But we found very quickly that that's not always correct, or even most of the time. So to understand this concept, you'll need to separate the idea in your head, that the objective that you choose in LinkedIn is actually the best objective for you if your goal matches that objective name. I know that's a little complex. So I'll give you an example here. If your objective is lead generation, because your boss said, we need to generate leads, then you'd probably go and try to select lead generation as your objective. And then you find out after selecting the lead generation objective, that all that means is now your ads are going to have a native lead generation form attached to them. And you may have wanted to generate a lead from your landing page form. So it certainly is worth understanding LinkedIn's definition of objectives. And of course, we'll find ways to use this to your advantage as well. The principle here is that the objective that you select in a campaign means that LinkedIn attempts to optimize towards that objective, but the definition of optimize is going to be different, I think, for you as the advertiser, then it means to LinkedIn. For LinkedIn, optimizing means volume, and they're usually not too concerned with cost efficiency. And for my experience, the advertisers goal is usually quite the opposite. Efficiency first, and volume second. The reason why LinkedIn optimizes towards this, I think they figured out very early on that it's worse to have an advertiser say, I put in my credit card, I developed campaigns, and it didn't spend anything, than it was to have someone come and say, I tried out LinkedIn Ads, and they were too expensive. And you might feel like this is more of a cash grab, like if LinkedIn is gonna charge people anyway, you might as well take their entire budget. But in talking to LinkedIn's product management team, I don't feel like that's the case, I don't feel like this is purposely grabby or being greedy or trying to rip anyone off. But I certainly see how this can feel. And I feel like that when a new advertiser goes in to create their first campaign, it's really daunting to look at this list of seven objectives, and immediately have to pick, ahhh, this is what I feel like is more my objective today. And I'd love to simplify this. So in my mind, it's so much easier to take out the things that aren't really all that valuable, leaving you with only the best ones to try. So let's walk through some of the objectives that I recommend avoiding. Objectives To Avoid 8:36 Brand Awareness The first is brand awareness as an objective, and I recommend this zero percent of the time, it's quite literally worthless. The reason why is the only thing that brand awareness as an objective has to optimize towards is people seeing the ad. And seeing the ad is exactly the same thing as an impression. And it doesn't make any sense to me that an ad platform can optimize towards showing impressions to people who happen to see impressions. And it would be okay, even if there's really no algorithm attached here. Except if you look at your bidding and budgeting, you can't actually change your bid. If you choose brand awareness as your objective, the only option you have, which really isn't an option is CPM bidding. So having a platform optimized towards showing impressions, it's not really a thing, I would just ignore this one altogether. If my goal is awareness, I would much rather go for something like the engagement objective, and then have the freedom to change my bid style based off of what I need, as well as whatever is going to give me the best costs. 9:41 Website Conversions The next one, and I know this is going to be controversial, but it's website conversions. I see people using this objective every single day. And it makes a lot of sense. If my goal is to get conversions, of course I would want to optimize towards that. But the challenge here is LinkedIn is attempting to optimize towards those that it feels are most likely to convert. But LinkedIn really has imperfect data here. The only data it really has is back in 2016, when they launched conversion tracking, and of course, there were so many people who installed it incorrectly, we've seen plenty of that, where it's firing a conversion for every landing page view or something like that. It meant that the data really isn't all that great. And the fact that this didn't come out till 2016, when everyone else has had conversion tracking for years and years and years, it means that there's a pretty small data set here. But of course, we have lead generation form ads. And for that, conversion tracking is absolutely perfect. It's flawless. This is a conversion that is occurring on Linkedin.com. LinkedIn sees everything about that conversion about who did it. And so that data is really good. But of course, we've only had that for a little while, too, we've had that for I think two or three years. So even if we assume all of the data is perfect, you look at Facebook, and Facebook probably has the best data scientists in the world working there. Facebook also has tons and tons of interaction and interest data. And I don't really know, but I'm guessing it's probably 1,000 to 10,000 times more data that Facebook has about us than what LinkedIn has about us. And even with all of that crazy amount of data, Facebook still recommends 50 to 100 conversions per week, per ad set for their conversion objective to work properly. So think about that 50 conversions per week per campaign, how many advertisers do you know who are spending large enough and having a high enough conversion rate to even do that on LinkedIn? Do you know? I can count on one hand the number of accounts, I know who can actually hit that. So I don't have a whole lot of faith in the website conversions objective, I just don't think that we have enough data most of the time for it to work. We've done quite a bit of testing. And what we've found is turning on website conversions objective versus just website visits, it was totally a coin flip as to whether things would improve or deprove, if that's a word. So sure, the data is maybe imperfect and the algorithm doesn't really have enough data to work with. But the real nail in the coffin for me on website conversions objective is that all of those advertisers who are using the conversions objective, they are providing extra competition in the auction, and they are willing to bid more for conversions. And so everyone's bidding each other up. So your cost per click and cost per conversion will likely be much higher on website conversions than it would be for just traditional website visits. And I don't think it's a bad thing to test, I would just start with website visits first, and then launch a website conversions version of it side by side and just test to see if you got any value out of it. Like I said, for me, the experience has really been a coin flip as to whether it's it does anything at all. 12:59 Video Views The next objective here is video views. So there is definitely a good reason to use video views objective, but I only recommend it to about 5% of video advertisers. And I know your jaw just dropped. So I'm going to explain this. Running video ads, especially on LinkedIn, it's just higher risk than running static ads. And that's because with a video ad, you really have two calls to action in everything. The first call to action is please watch this video. And then your second call to action is whatever you want them to do afterwards, click to our landing page or fill out this form. And in order to count as a view on LinkedIn, someone just has to watch for two seconds or more as it's playing there in their feed. And for my experience, it's usually about a quarter of everyone who will count as a view. So if you have 1,000 impressions, you'll probably end up with 250 views. And that's not much of a commitment to stick around for two or more seconds. So it doesn't tell me that someone's actually interested. Which means if I'm paying by a cost per view of a video, or even cost per impression, I won't really know how that's performing because my cost per view or cost per impression, it will just look higher than what it was when I was running a static ad against it. And I'm not telling you don't run video because video is a very powerful medium and LinkedIn video ads can be really good, especially because they just released the ability for us to to retarget video viewers. But what many of you may not know is that if you choose your objective of website visits, you can actually run video creative inside of that, which means you can still show your ad to people and it's video, it's going to play automatically. But now you're only going to pay when someone actually clicks on whatever your landing page is. And the same thing works with lead generation objective. You're only going to pay when someone opens up the form. And because opening the form or clicking to my landing page is a much stronger action, it's a much better signal to me to know whether or not I have a good engagement rate or poor. So I'm a big fan of start your video campaigns out on a cost per click basis. And then if you find that your engagement rate is really high, then it makes sense to launch a video views campaign, and then bid by either cost per view, or cost per impression, whichever is less expensive. And that'll have you saving some money. And like we talked about before, with whatever objective that minimizes your cost per impression will also minimize your cost per click, the same rule applies with a cost per view as well. So you just want to see your effective cost per view, effective cost per impression, and effective cost per click as low as possible. And you use whatever objective or whatever bidding model gets you there. 15:56 Job Applicants And the last objective I would tell you to avoid is job applicants. Now, if you're just using LinkedIn for recruiting, it's totally possible that this could be a really good objective for you. But quite honestly, I haven't used it very much. And I can't see how this would actually be more beneficial than just using any of the other objectives, and targeting just those with the trait of job seekers. And of course, that way, you'd actually have more freedom, you could choose whichever ad format you wanted, you could choose whichever bid model you wanted. So I just don't see much of an advantage to having this as an objective. But please let me know if you've experienced otherwise. Okay, we're gonna take a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive back into which objectives you do want to use. 16:40 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $130 million on LinkedIn ads, and getting you the lowest costs and the highest quality leads is our focus. And we're the only media buying agency to become official LinkedIn partners, so you know we're doing something right. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to chat about your campaigns, or reach out to us on LinkedIn or Twitter or Morse code. No matter how you get in touch, we'll make sure you look like the hero. 17:23 Objectives You'll Want To Use and How To Use ThemAlright, let's jump back into the objectives that you'll want to use and how to use them. Website Visits So when I'm considering which objective I want to run for a campaign, the first thing I'm going to do is decide whether my traffic is going to my website, or I'm keeping them on LinkedIn. And if you're trying to decide between the pros and cons there, check out Episode 17 on lead generation form ads, and that'll go way deep into it and you'll know your answer there. And if you want your traffic to go to your website or a landing page, you can't go wrong with website visits. I love it because it's the lowest risk type of ad format and objective. The reason for that is you're going to pay only when someone clicks to your website. So you're not going to pay when someone clicks like or when they go to follow your company, or when they just click to go see your company, or how about when they comment below. All of those actions would otherwise be payable, but because you selected website visits as your objective, you're only going to pay for those clicks to your landing page. It makes it ultra low risk. And it's a great place to start. And if you are sending traffic to your landing page or your website, you can totally own it. You can track all of your tracking with really complex or beautiful UTM parameters. You can retarget that traffic with your other channels like Facebook and Google. And inevitably, you'll end up with higher lead quality, because that person has been to your website, and they've received a stronger branding impression than they would have by not visiting your website. And you also have a lot of freedom here and how you bid, you can bid cost per click cost per thousand impressions and auto bidding. You'll even now see target cost per click, which we've talked about before, not my favorite bidding model. But there's a lot of freedom here and how you bid. But if you do want to just keep your traffic on LinkedIn and take advantage of the higher conversion rates that you get by not transitioning someone from one website to another. You can do that with LinkedIn's lead generation form ads, which can be attached to any sponsored content. That's your newsfeed ads, or any sort of sponsored messaging ads, so sponsored messages or conversation ads. 19:34 Lead Generation You'll remember from Episode 17, how we talked about lead gen forms produced the cheapest leads possible, generally conversion rates that are 10 to 50% higher than if you sent to a landing page. But because LinkedIn made it so easy, you're probably going to see a diminished quality of lead. As of recently we can start to retarget anyone who interacts with that form, so whether someone opened it or whether they filled it out, both of those actions we can target or exclude from our campaigns now, which is amazing. They've got the same flexibility in bidding, we can bid by cost per click cost per thousand impressions, or an auto bid. 20:13 EngagementAnd then you have engagement as an objective. Now, I love engagement, simply because it allows me to hack the algorithm a little bit. The deal with engagement is you actually pay for any interaction on the ad, you're going to pay whether someone clicks to your landing page, or whether they click like, comment, share, a click to your company page, or any other interaction. And so if you're bidding cost per click, that sure could add up to a bunch of people who aren't taking the actions you want them to take. But here's why I like it so much. The bid floors on engagement are 35% lower than they are when you choose website visits or lead generation objective. So basically, that means that if you use engagement as an objective, it's possible to get a 35% reduction in your costs. And if you check out Episode 26, all about what makes LinkedIn Ads so expensive, you'll learn more about this. So here's how I decide whether or not I want to use the engagement objective. I'm going to launch a website visits campaign or a lead generation campaign. And if I look at those sponsored content, and I see that less than 35% of my clicks are coming from social actions, then I know it's going to be cheaper to use the engagement objective and be able to bid 35% lower and go ahead and pay for those extra interactions. We've done this where the ads that we launch, they just don't tend to get interactions, they don't tend to get likes, comments, shares or company follows. And this is great, we run those as engagement ads and of course, 100% of the clicks or near it are going to the landing page, and we're able to pay 35% less. It's pretty cool. And of course, if you know this, if you know how the objectives are charged, and what they optimized towards, you can have some cool hacks, you can do some fun things. Some examples of this could be things like a quiz that where you're specifically asking for engagement, but you set the objective as website visits. So all those actions will be free and you'll only pay for a few people clicking. And of course, you can send that traffic to somewhere where it might be valuable anyway, like a demo page or something. And this can play double duty here as well. Because I'm sure as many of you know, anytime that someone takes a social action on LinkedIn, liking, comment, or resharing, it then helps that post go viral. It becomes eligible to be seen by that person's followers and connections. So if you can do this in an ad and get people to want to engage socially, then you'll get a ton more viral views and clicks. A similar kind of hack you could do is you could run a video ad on cost per click with website visits as your objective. And then make the call to action a social engagement. Like if you agree or comment with why you disagree, something like that. And again, that would also help it really go viral. And please reach out. Let me know any cool and interesting ways that you've found to hack LinkedIn's objectives to get better pricing. Okay, I've got the episode resources coming up for you. So stick around. 23:30 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. As promised, check down below in the show notes for the article that I wrote on MarketingLand back in 2016 about bid type objectives. It's certainly older, but it'll help you understand the principle of whatever bidding gets you the lowest impression cost will also get you the lowest cost per click. You'll see a link to Episode 17 on lead gen forms, which will help you understand your objectives, as well as Episode 26 about why LinkedIn ads are so expensive. That'll help you understand the engagement objective and when and how it's less expensive. Check out the course on LinkedIn learning or LinkedIn Ads. I'm the author of it. And it's an incredibly inexpensive and great way to train yourself or your staff, whoever is looking to get started at LinkedIn Ads. On whatever player you're listening, look down and hit the subscribe button and as soon as you found value in anything that I've shared, make sure to rate. And please leave a review. I would love to shout you out. I give shoutouts to anyone who leaves a review. With any questions or topic suggestions, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources: Find which companies use competitors' products: Datanyze.com BuiltWith.com Episodes we referenced: Ep 10 - What should you offer from your LinkedIn Ads? Ep 15 - Benchmarking Your LinkedIn Ads Ep 17 - LinkedIn Lead Gen Form Ads - Should You Use Them? Ep 27 - Agile Testing For Your LinkedIn Ads Management Ep 29 - LinkedIn Ads Saturation - Are you experiencing it? Ep 30 - LinkedIn Ads Newest Features and Future Roadmap LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Show Transcript: You ask, we answer. The great Q&A episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show coming right atcha. Buckle up. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. A huge thank you to all you who submitted questions for our first Q&A episode. You certainly didn't throw any softballs. So you're about to get an eclectic mix of some of the most challenging issues that you'll face on LinkedIn Ads. A quick dip into the reviews. Raul Hernandez Ochoa says "best in class. AJ delivers real value from experience, love the actionable insights." Raul, thank you so much for saying that. I trust your opinion more than almost anyone out there. For those who don't know, Raul hosts the #DoGoodWork podcast, and he is the master of systems and productivity. So he's definitely worth listening to and following. And then Felicia Gheorghe, who's a paid social pro at a company called DHI in Copenhagen says, "Good stuff. Probably the best podcast on the interwebs. Hands on and no generic advice. Love it. Thank you, AJ Wilcox, for making this happen." Felicia, I don't know that I would agree that it is the best podcast on the interwebs. But heck, yeah, I'll take it. I would absolutely love to feature you. So please leave a review wherever you tend to review things and I'd love to shout you out and feature you here. Okay, with that being said, let's hit it. Leonardo Bellini, from Italy, says my question is this one, "Which is the best trade off between available budget and campaigns granularity? If I have, let's say, a 5000 euro budget, does it make sense to split the budget into say four campaigns?" I know you're a big fan of running more campaigns in parallel using different audience targeting options. And Leonardo, this is a great one because I am a huge fan of splitting up audiences into smaller segments so that I can learn something. I treat each small segment like a private focus group that no one else can see. But if we break up too granularly, we definitely end up hitting some roadblocks. For instance, each campaign has to have a minimum $10 or 10 euro budget for the day, if you break your audience up into two smaller groups, each one could spend $10 or 10 euro per day, which is $300, or 300 euro. And if I take a look at a campaign after it's spent $300, or 300 euro, my reaction is honestly going to be well, that is not enough data to actually tell what's going on. So I need this to run longer. And then at the same time, if you take your 5,000 euro budget, and you break that up into 20 campaigns, just at the minimum of 10 euro per day, you're going to overspend your budget by twice. So breaking up too small really does have its disadvantages. I like to shoot for about $1,000 per month or 1,000 euro per campaign. So if a budget is $5k, I'd probably do about five campaigns max. And then when budgets get into the $100k range, the six figures, I'll go a little bit further, we can do 100 to 150 campaigns pretty easily. But don't take these numbers as an absolute constraint. We run campaigns all the time with 300 people in them. So it just depends on whether or not it's worth your time to manage a small audience and realize that it's probably going to have to run longer than just a single month to gain any learnings from it. And of course, if you're working with an agency like ours, who cares, you know, make us manage tiny little campaigns. That's what we're here for. 3:33 Georgiana Dumitru says, "Great opportunity, AJ, so I'm taking advantage of it. I would like to know if you ever build up campaigns for a B2C client and that it generated results? Thanks!" And Georgiana, this is a great question because I get asked about B2C all the time. The big challenge with LinkedIn Ads is it's expensive, and it's also more middle of funnel. And those two things don't lend themselves very well if you're let's say selling handbags or or you have some kind of e commerce product. So most of the time, I'm picturing B2B when I'm talking about LinkedIn Ads. But we have found quite a few B2C use cases where it tends to work quite well. We've seen things like coaching programs, which that's technically B2C. You're training professional, but it's the money coming out of their own wallet for that training. We found hiring and recruiting, obviously, that's kind of LinkedIn is bread and butter that works quite well. We've seen things in financial services. We even had a helicopter transport company like the Uber of helicopters work extremely well. Some of the most efficient campaigns we've ever seen. We've seen travel higher ed, all of these things work. So in general, yeah, I think B2C isn't the best fit, but there are certainly pockets and good use cases where it does make sense. 4:50 Chris Dickson asks, "What's your best solution for retargeting competitors and their customers?" Oh, Chris, you're speaking my language here. If you're advertising on something like Twitter, This is really easy. You just target the followers of your competitors Twitter handle, and now you have access to their followers, their users, and people who like them, it makes a lot of sense. But on LinkedIn, we can't target company page followers. In fact, unless you are the company page owner, you can't even see who your followers are. So some of the ways that we go about this, you can take a look at services like Datanyze and BuiltWith.com And what they do is they crawl the web, they look at the different tags, the marketing tags, and JavaScript on companies' websites that tell which products they're using. And then they go on the back end and say, Okay, cool. It looks like IBM is using Marketo. Great, and they compile this list. So if your competitor is a company who installs JavaScript, tracking tags on people's websites, then you could go and buy a report from someone like Datanyze and BuiltWith and just get a list of here's all the the people who are customers of this competitor. And then you could take that list and upload it as a matched audience, and show ads just to the relevant roles of those companies. I think this works extremely well. I'm a big fan. Something else you could do is go and find out if LinkedIn has a skill around either the competitors name, or the names of their products. And if you can target people who have that skill, and then maybe subtract current and past employees because they would obviously have that skill too. That might get you practitioners who use your competitors' software or service. Something else you could do, go to the company's page, scroll down to where their posts start, and click on the ads filter. And then you'll get to see some of their ads, actually, the last six months worth of sponsored content ads that they're running, and click through on some of them and look and see what the UTM parameters are, as they're sending you to their landing page. In some of those UTM parameters, you might see some clues about how their targeting, or what kind of campaign this is. And that could give you some interesting insight into how to counteract them, or one of them. 7:10 Daniel Borba says "video ads on LinkedIn, any and all questions around that topic". Yeah, this definitely seems like it should be a whole episode. But I'll touch on this one too. Video is really tough on LinkedIn. And it's a lot better now that we have this engagement retargeting so we can start to do sequences, and you can do storytelling. The basics of why video ads are tough to make work on LinkedIn is, number one, they're expensive. And number two, anytime you have a video ad, there's inherently two calls to action. The first is going to be watch this video. And the second is going to be take some kind of action that we're going to ask you after. And of course, you as sophisticated advertisers know, the more things we ask of our prospects, the less likely they're going to be to do it or the more people we're going to have dropped out of that process. And of course, they're not inexpensive. LinkedIn has an opportunity cost when they show a sponsored content ad, they know that that is worth probably $8 to $11 per click. And so when you show video, they have to charge enough that they're still going to get the same or more from that inventory. And because the video now has two calls to action, it's inherently going to get less interaction, meaning that your cost per is going to increase. So I will do a whole episode on video ads. But here's a basic strategy. Most don't know this, but with video ads, you can bid cost per view, or cost per impression. Of course, that's the only two options you get if you set the video views objective, but you can also bid by cost per click if that's within a website visits or a lead generation objective campaign. So I'm a big fan of start by bidding cost per click with video just to take the risk away, test out your creative, and then switch to cost per view or cost per impression where it makes sense, if you can get your costs down because engagement so high. Make sure your videos have a lot of action within the first two seconds, because that's all you get to grab people. And then make sure you've got a good thumbnail especially for those slower internet connections who can't see that action. Give them something good to look at. And your subtitles have to be either burned in or uploaded as .srt files because 80% of the viewers will watch with the sound off so it's got to look good with the sound off. 9:25 Guadalupe Molina says "I need to demystify what is a click. When I put website clicks as an objective and create an ad that links to a website article and I bid by cost per click, every time the money is spent, does that mean that a click goes to the website? Or can it mean that I'm bidding for any type of click, just as clicking on my brand logo, etc.? I cannot find this answer anywhere." And Guadalupe you are in luck. I actually have an episode about objectives coming out very soon. So watch for that. But this is definitely where objectives get complex because if your objective If is set as engagement, engagement means any click so you're going to get charged if you're bidding by cost per click for likes, comments shares, a follow to your company page, a click to your company page, or a click to your landing page. So if you're bidding by engagement, yeah, you're going to pay for everything. The nice thing is though, the engagement is about 35% cheaper. So if your ads are getting pretty much only clicks to your landing page, engagements are a cool hack of being able to pay less for your clicks. But if you choose website visits or conversion, then what LinkedIn calls a click is only a click to your landing page. So if you open up your analytics, and you see that LinkedIn reports 20 clicks, but analytics only sees 16, what happens there is yeah, you paid for 20 clicks because LinkedIn technically sent them, but for people of that 20 dropped out or left or whatever before the page was finished loading. A lot of times this has to do with your page load speed. Especially because pages just take longer to load on mobile. So it's definitely worthwhile to make sure your landing pages load fast for mobile, so that people don't get bored of waiting for it to load and end up leaving. If your objective is lead generation, a click is when they open the form. So we'll go a lot deeper into that one in a future episode, a very near future episode, but Guadalupe thanks for asking that. 11:25 And then Kristine Sergejeva has asked several different questions. Thank you, Kristine, I'm so excited to have these. She asks, "Can GIFs be used as LinkedIn ads?" And that would be like an animated GIF. Unfortunately, no, you have to convert that to a video and use it as a video ad if you want to use it on LinkedIn. I've tried animated GIFs in about every way I can think of. I even turned an animated GIF into a ping. So LinkedIn would accept it and still it doesn't play the animation even though it does everywhere else on the web. She also asks, "I still do not have clarity, when and how much I have to increase the bid, if I start with the lowest bid." And this is going with AJ's strategy of bid the very minimum, don't plan on actually spending your budget and you just want to minimize your cost per lead. So she says, "Will a higher bid also increase my click through rate or only impressions, or it depends?". So Kristine, this is definitely one of those cases where it depends on a lot of different factors, but we'll break them down here. How much you increase your bid or decrease really depends on the speed that you need to know at. So for instance, if you're at the beginning of the month, and you have a whole month to spend the budget, you might want to increase by 10 or 20 cent increments until you start to see traffic come through that's meaningful. But if you're in a rush, let's say you're four days before the end of the month, and you've got a budget to spend, then you might move by whole dollars, you might increase by $1 or $2 and just see. The goal is to find that point at which you are bidding the least possible to still spend your budget. And whether you find that by incrementally slowly decreasing from the minimum, or starting at the minimum, bouncing high, and then backing it back to somewhere in the middle, the goal is just to eventually find that point of efficiency. And then to your second point here, yes, raising your bid can increase your click through rate. But I definitely wouldn't count on it all the time. What happens is, if your ad is towards the top of the feed, it's going to generally get clicked on a lot more than one that is further down the feed. So if your ad is in the first position, which is the second post on someone's feed, then it'll likely get five or 10 times the click through rate if it were in the second ad position, which is like seven posts down the page. But what happens is if your ad is performing well, if it's getting a high click through rate, even if you're not bidding very much so LinkedIn wouldn't want to put you at the top. But if your ads get clicked on a lot, there's really high engagement, then they're motivated to continue to put you at the top, even though you're not bidding a whole lot. So really the key here is having really good performing ads. And then you can get it to where you are bidding very low, but still showing near the top of the feed and getting a nice high click through rate. But of course, when you increase your bid, you will definitely increase your impressions. And this is because you are making yourself more competitive in the auction, therefore winning more auction, therefore winning more auctions for impressions, so you will definitely see more impressions. But watch what happens to your click through rate. If you're bidding CPM, you will definitely see a change in in click through rates as you bid up and down. And that's because a direct CPM bid totally affects whether you show up in the first position, or the eighth position, which would be like 50 something slots down. Christine also says "I had this bad experience, that each change that I make to a campaign, makes the campaign's performance worse. Have you noticed this or is it just me? Is it just for sure period of time while the platform is adjusting to the requested change?" And Kristine, I haven't found this to be the case. But I also wouldn't be surprised if this is actually saturation. So go back and listen to Episode 29, if you haven't already all about saturation. Because when you're experiencing saturation, something that worked before, is just going to continue performing worse and worse. And it acts like a stair step pattern, where your click through rates will fall gradually and slowly. But you will dip down in chunks as you drop in your relevancy score, and start losing auctions quicker. It also could be the message or the offer. So don't count those out. And remember that the best audience doesn't mean that performance will be great. And what I mean by that is if you are narrowing your audience to more of the right people, it doesn't mean that you'll see performance increase necessarily, but it does mean that the lead quality that you generate from those should be better. So I wouldn't count on this turning around by itself, I would suggest holding your audiences consistent. So define who the right audiences are and then test different messaging and offers against them until you see performance pop back up. And ideally stay for, you know, at least two or three weeks before you have to refresh anything. Then Kristine asks, "Is it normal that after I paused the campaign and then activated again, it takes like a day for the campaign to activate and starts with very few impressions." And Kristine back in like 2012. LinkedIn used to claim that if you pause the campaign and then reactivated it, that it would reset your relevancy score. And so there'd be this learning curve that your ads and campaign have to go through again, before they really went back to normal. Now, even since, like 2012, when I heard this, I've done a lot of pausing and unpause in campaigns. And I have never actually seeing this occur. So I kind of think that it's not true. And maybe that was just LinkedIn not wanting us to pause campaigns, so they continue making money. I don't know. But what I find is the learning curve that Facebook advertisers go through is really crazy. I mean, it's to the point where if you double your budget overnight, it's like your whole account freaks out and it takes several days for the algorithm to catch up and go back to performing well. When you launch new ads, it'll take quite a while for performance to kick in. And I'm actually really grateful because LinkedIn users, we don't really go through that. When we launch a new campaign. When we increase bids. When we increase budgets, we don't see a giant shake up like you'd see on something like Facebook. When we launch new ads, it's normal for LinkedIn to show impressions for a day, a day and a half for it to get a feel for relevancy score, and then kind of go to its normal cadence. But even that learning that LinkedIn goes through is usually pretty kind. It's giving really solid impressions, usually in pretty good inventory. So I actually really like that first testing period for ads. So I haven't found that to be the case that pausing and unpausing campaigns really negatively affects them. It could be a relevancy score issue. So I would try changing up your ads, changing up your offers, and just see if you can get something with a high relevancy score that isn't necessarily swayed too much, especially as saturation occurs. Along the same lines, she asks, "Have you noticed that normally for the first week of the campaign, it can perform really well, even with very low bids. But then starting from the second week, the platform seems to be just doing everything to push you to increase the bids." Now, it is very possible that LinkedIn is purposely trying to trick you into raising your bids and disincentivizing you from bidding low, but I really only see this happening when my ads aren't getting a great click through rate. So if you're around average, or maybe slightly above or even below, I could see this happening as your relevancy score is dropping. What you get is lackluster performance, plus saturation when people have already seen your ads, and they start clicking at a lower rate. And then as your relevancy score drops, you need to increase your bids to stay competitive in the auction and get LinkedIn to keep showing them. So that's probably what you're experiencing. But if you can play with messaging and offers to the point where you're getting like, .7, .8%, click through rates. Usually this isn't an issue. 19:22 And Sean Possemato asks, "What kind of data does the insights tag give you from your website visitors if you're not running LinkedIn ads?" So what Shawn is referring to is the free website demographics that anyone can get by opening up a LinkedIn Ads account and installing the insight tag on their website. You don't have to spend a dime. And it's kind of like Google Analytics or Facebook Analytics, where the platform is showing you what they can see from your website traffic. And this is great, I recommend everyone do this, whether or not you're spending money on LinkedIn Ads, or whether or not you're even B2B. There are reporting that you'll see from this are things like job function, title of the people who are visiting your website, their company names. It's like the last 20 companies or maybe the most interactive 20 companies, industry, seniority, company size, location, country or region and even county. And as a bonus here, if you've set up website retargeting segments, you can also break down all of your website demographics by these segments. So for instance, create a retargeting segment, even if you don't plan to advertise to them, of just people who've filled out your forms and made it to thank you pages, or maybe just people who visit the Contact Us page. And then you'll get to see the titles, the securities, companies of people who made it to those pages. And I think that's really powerful information. In Episode 30, we mentioned that this feature is going to be getting a nice boost coming up soon. So I'm expecting a lot more information, but as of right now, it's those whatever seven or eight different dimensions that you can break your traffic down by. And they will tell you traffic percentage. So what percentage of the job function of business development has been on your page, but they're not going to show you click through rates or anything in more detail because they didn't originate that traffic. They don't know what actions people took to get there, or anything like that. 21:20 And Raul Hernandez Ochoa, the same one who left the review, so thank you, Raul. He asks, "Are there click to message ads coming to LinkedIn, like on Facebook?" And for those of you who don't know, click to message ads on Facebook, what they do is they drive traffic directly into Facebook Messenger, where you can have a more powerful chat bot experience for that prospect. And truthfully, I don't know, conversation ads on LinkedIn are really LinkedIn's first foray into that chat bot experience. And I know there's a lot of directions that they could take this. Partner integrations into things like MobileMonkey and WeChat, but we don't know where that is on their roadmap or their list of priorities. I would say that if conversation ads as an ad format performs really well, they'll probably try to make it more powerful and do something like this with it in the future, but truthfully, I don't know. 22:12 And Biswarup Banerjee says, "How has the corona related crisis affected the ad spend on LinkedIn by companies?" And we did see a lot of big companies pull back spend during that first period of economic uncertainty. We also saw a lot of small advertisers quit entirely. And the effect that we saw, this looks like it caused costs per click to drop by five or 10%. And I had friends telling me that Facebook prices had dropped 10 to 30, maybe even 40%. I even had a friend who invests heavily in YouTube ads tell me that prices dropped to like a seventh of where they were, which is incredible, but it looks by now that most companies have really kind of gone back to normal, or at least close to normal. We also see a lot of new entrants into LinkedIn Ads because of budget that they had set aside for things like trade shows and conferences aren't happening anymore. And that budget needs to go somewhere. And I'm so glad that those budgets are going into digital. Lots of companies coming into the 21st century. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into the rest of the Q&A 23:17 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. 23:26 If reducing your cost per lead, and increasing your LinkedIn Ads scale is your goal. B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $130 million on LinkedIn Ads, managing the largest accounts at scale, and getting the lowest costs. We're the only media buying agency to be official LinkedIn partners, so you know, we're doing something right. fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com, to chat about your campaigns, or heck, contact us through morse code, or no matter how you get in touch, we'll make sure that we make you the hero. 23:59 All right, let's jump back into more Q&A, Chase Gladden, one of the best marketers I know in San Francisco asks, "What would you use as a minimum test budget, as well as what point would you decide a test has received enough impressions spend and conversions to declare a winner?" So number of impressions I don't really care much about, but I find that 100 clicks is a good first test on conversions. At LinkedIn, $8 to $11 cost per click average 100 clicks is going to be $800 to $1,100. dollars. And I would call this sticking your toe in the water because after about 100 clicks, if you've got like one conversion, then you know that it's performing really poorly. And if you've got like 20 conversions, you don't know for sure that you have a 20% conversion rate, just because the data isn't complete yet. But you know, it's performing really well. So after 100 clicks, I know directionally whether or not it's a good offer or good ads. In North America prices. It's usually about $300 in spend before we see click through rates become statistically significant. So if your goal is just to find out what's the message that gets my prospects to engage, you can usually do that after spending about $300 between two different ad variants. If you have a good content offer, check out Episode 10 for going really deep on offers, then it's usually about $5,000 in North American spend before your conversions becomes statistically significant. So if you have a great budget, yeah, I would go at least $5,000 a month, run a significant test every month to the conversion. But if you have less than that, or just need to pivot faster, yeah, you can make these decisions a little bit quicker. 25:41 Anna Phillips asks a good one. She says, "Well, this is probably a better question for someone who works at LinkedIn. But why do you think the ad platform is so behind the times when it comes to customizing data, reporting, comparing different time periods, segmenting by platform device, etc. Like they just added the ability to custom itemized columns and to see frequency metrics maybe a month ago. Do you think there's a specific reason behind this discrepancy between potential and reality? And do you see it getting better in the near future?" This one's definitely going to get me in trouble, but I'll answer completely and honestly, I don't think that LinkedIn had much faith in its ads platform from the very beginning. It's always been really expensive, and LinkedIn still make 60% of its revenue from recruiter. So LinkedIn Marketing Solutions has always really been the redheaded stepchild. I remember early on and LinkedIn Ads when it took two and a half years for them to roll out just a new UI change, because they only have like two developers, and they were both shared with recruiter so they couldn't give the ad platform very much time or attention. And to LinkedIn's credit, in the last few years. It really seems like we've seen LinkedIn realize that it has something truly special and trying to catch up. But of course, it's very far behind. I don't see LinkedIn products team using their own products, unfortunately. And I don't know what this is like in all kinds of different industries. I don't know if product is usually not using their own product. And I'm not sure whether Facebook and Google do this. But I see that as being a core reason why things get released that aren't actually what advertisers want. So I would love to see people who are planning product and roadmap at LinkedIn, actually having advertising experience or actively advertising for a client on the side or something like that, so that they can actually experience their own products. And I think things would come a little bit better ironed out for us. I also think that there's a level of arrogance within the LinkedIn corporation that won't come across when you talk to an individual. When you talk to any of them, they come across as very much wanting the best for their advertisers and listening. But I bet that attitude and arrogance would be palpable in a leadership meeting, and I know that would trickle down to the product. LinkedIn Marketing Solutions has done very well as an organization over the last several years with just constant growth. And I think LinkedIn is actually patting themselves on the back for seeing that growth. But I think that growth is actually happening in spite of them and their policies. I think this growth is happening because marketers are getting more sophisticated. We have better tracking and reporting, and attribution technologies that are helping us realize that we have this need for higher quality traffic. We can watch what happens after the initial conversion as it goes through the sales process. And LinkedIn has always had extremely high traffic quality. So I think marketers are turning around, even if LinkedIn thinks that it's their products that are really taking the credit. I honestly think that if LinkedIn really understood what it had, it would work to sprint to become a world class platform. And I think it could be as long as they will use their own product and listen really carefully to customers. And even if LinkedIn really sprints and makes this happen, it's going to be really hard to shake the image that LinkedIn has had for years of being "too expensive and it doesn't work". So right now is where you say. woah AJ, tell us how you really feel. 29:08 Okay, next one's from Laurie Archer, who says, "This one may stump you. I've already reached out to LinkedIn support to have this answered, but they are unable to assist me. I work for a marketing agency, and I have a client who wants me to post ads promoting their products to their page and show up in the newsfeed of their followers. However, I need to use my own credit card for these ads, not theirs, and I don't want them to have access to my credit card. I have campaign manager access to their account. So how can I post ads to a client's page and use my own credit card to purchase them while keeping the number private? Any suggestions would be so helpful." Laurie, this one's not stumping for me at all. In fact, I'm really surprised that LinkedIn couldn't get you an answer on this one. Here's what you'll want to do. Have the client give you account manager access to the account because right now you just have campaign manager and then have them make you the billing admin then you place your credit card in there. Now, the reason why this works, there can be only one billing admin. And only that person can change the credit card and even see the last four digits of it that's on file. And of course, the client can still be account manager access, and account managers can actually change the billing manager. If heaven forbid you got hit by a bus or something, they could still make someone else the account manager. And what happens is, if the client changes to another billing admin, your credit card number would be immediately erased. So there's no concern there at all. The account will just shut off until someone puts a new credit card in. 30:36 Our next one. Stacy Taylor says, "Great, I have a question. I noticed that when building different audience segments, if the audience is small, the estimated costs are higher. Often I end up grouping segments together to keep costs lower, that I would actually prefer to separate out to target the messaging better. Do you have best practices or research on audience size considerations? Do you have best practices research on audience size considerations in relation to the cost and message targeting?" Yes, Stacy, this is totally the case. The smaller your audience size is, the higher you have to bid to be competitive. And I'm not sure what causes this. It's the same thing on Facebook. So it could be something like a smaller audience means that there are other bidders who are targeting larger audiences that you have to outbid for those members. Honestly, it could be artificial, where LinkedIn is just charging you a premium in the auction for being more specific. It could be a smaller audience produces fewer impressions anyway, so we have to bid competitively just to see traffic. And really, it could be all three or none of them. But I find that this can be overcome for the most part with just good efficiency of your ads. A tighter audience means that you can be more specific in your ad copy, which leads to higher click through rates, which lead to an increased relevancy score, allowing you to bid less and still get the same traffic. But sometimes you can't and you end up just having to balance paying, let's say 30 cents to $1 more per click as just the cost of getting data into your silent focus groups. Because that's what these micro campaigns are is just data for you to understand how this segment of the population reacts to what you've shown them. 32:18 And I know I'm absolutely going to butcher this name, but Kaj Robert Karjalainen asks, "What would work best LinkedIn lead gen forms are driving the prospect to a landing page?" And then second part of the question, "Which objective works best with video ads?" So the first one about LinkedIn lead gen forms, Kaj, I've got a great episode for you. Go check out Episode 17 that goes way into more depth about lead gen forms. But basically, I would say if your goal is quality of prospect, send them to your landing page. And if your goal is quantity of number of prospects at the lowest cost, go with the lead gen forms and Episode 17 will explain exactly why. But your secondary part of the question here, you'll want to check out the episode on objectives that's going to come out here in the next few weeks. But like I explained a little earlier, I choose website visits or lead gen so that I can bid cost per click on my video ads to start with. That reduces the risk until I can find out if the ads perform well enough that I can bid by cost per view, or cost per impression and save money there. 33:24 Mayur Katkar says, "Can we put maximum targeting options to increase the lead relevancy?" And I think what Mayur is asking is, can we keep stacking different targeting together to make our audiences more relevant? And yes, you can absolutely do this. And I'm a big fan of it. But like we mentioned here a couple questions ago, the more targeting options that you pile on, the higher your floor price goes. So the more you're going to end up paying. So I only recommend stacking what you would actually find helpful. For instance, if you just want a smaller audience size, I wouldn't put something like like company size or gender or something like that on top of it just to shrink it down, because anything you add is going to increase your floor bid. So only ad targeting that you would actually find helpful and be more core around who your prospect is. 34:15 Okay. Ivy Hou asks, "I'd like to know how to do a budget and conversion forecast for LinkedIn ads as a new channel." Now Ivy, this is absolutely deserving of a whole episode. And so I've added this to my list of content I want to cover. And we'll absolutely do this on forecasting. But check out Episode 27 on agile testing, if you haven't already. This is going to be extremely helpful for you in just seeing the strategy of how I approach something. But here's the general outline of that strategy. I shoot for a $5,000 a month budget if I'm in North America, if I'm targeting outside North America, I can budget less and then within the first $1,000 spent all know about what my conversion rate is. And my conversion rate and my cost per conversion is essentially going to tell me what can I expect from this platform? Is it a total fail? Is it a total win? Or something in between? And then check out Episode 15 on benchmarks. So you can take a look at your cost per click, your click through rates, and your conversion rates along the way to see if you're in line, ahead, or falling behind. And then get ready to pause or revert if you see performance slide. Every new test that you do, take it as that, it's a test and something that could be a bad test. So be willing to revert and say, Ooh, okay, my hypothesis was wrong. Let's go start something else. And you'll definitely want to set internal expectations with your boss, with the board, the CEO, whoever, that this is a pilot and your goal is performance and not just randomly spending an entire budget, whatever that is. I think it would be way better to come in under budget and know that yeah, looks like LinkedIn could be an efficient channel for us, rather than just saying, well, I had a $5,000 budget. So I spent it, but I didn't spend it well, because then you'll look at the performance of that spend after and conclude that LinkedIn is too expensive and doesn't work, which I've heard so many times. It's not even funny. 36:11 Alex Pethick says, "Hey @wilcoxaj, I'm a fan of your podcast. Thanks for all the advice you provide. I'm curious, have you noticed that LinkedIn has removed the ads tab from the company profile pages? Any idea how to see competitors ads now"? Thanks, Alex. Yeah, this one threw me for a loop too. In recent episodes, I've mentioned that I found where that was. You go to the company page, and then just scroll down until you see the ads filter above all the posts, and then you'll still get it. So it's still there, but it just moved. 36:42 Jeffrey Donnelly asks, "Why doesn't the platform allow users to identify their wants and needs and connect advertisers to those wants and needs?" And this is one that I really wish we could do. For the longest time we had search platforms like Google where people were showing their intent, what they wanted and what they were searching for. And then you had platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook, where you were showing someone your personal traits. But there wasn't anything that blended the two. When I heard that LinkedIn was up for sale, I was just hoping and praying that Google would buy them so that we would get the world's biggest search intent database, overlaid with the professional trait data that only LinkedIn has. But of course, Microsoft bought them. So I didn't quite get my wish here. I know, they've tried to do this a little bit with interest targeting at least at one point, I don't know if it still does, but it'll take into account someone's Bing search history. So anyone that they know of who's searching on Bing, they can get that intent data. But I'm imagining that's a very small segment of data that probably doesn't influence things all too much. And in Episode 30, we talked about what's coming on the roadmap, and that we're going to get products on pages, which is kind of like a review mechanism. And maybe we'll see, once we have something like that maybe there's a way we can signal interest or desire for a certain class of products. And then advertisers could, let's say, if we're trying to choose a new CRM, we could signal that interest and CRM advertisers would naturally show us more ads. 38:14 Caroline Wyly asks, "I've had good performing ads and some embarrassingly poor performers. With the poor performers, no matter how much budget tweaks, change in copy, audience, etc. Nothing worked. What made it even worse is that it was a lead gen campaign and the few leads that did come through we're not have the right seniority. Not much insight from LinkedIn either." And Caroline, I think this goes down to two different things. Usually, I can trace good ads back to a good offer. So check Episode 10 to learn more about offers. And I can usually trace bad performance back to bad offers. And we face the same challenge where if a client gives us a not very interesting offer, and we're trying to craft ad copy, and creative to try to make that look good, there's only so much lipstick that you can put on a pig trying to make it look pretty. So changing or adjusting the offer trying to get it to where it's providing a lot of potential value to the prospect where it's showing a lot of perceived value to the prospect. Usually those offers will be easy to write high performing ads for and they also help them convert better. But anytime leads come through that don't match my specific targeting. I think that's a completely different issue. So the first thing I would say is check to see, do you have audience expansion enabled on these campaigns? This is the worst offender, because that box is checked by default, you've got to really be vigilant to make sure you're unchecking that. And it allows LinkedIn to stick anyone they want into your existing audience. So that's most likely the case make sure you go and uncheck that. And likely you'll start getting seniority is coming through that actually match your targeting. But this could also be viral traffic. And what happens is anytime in your target audience that someone hits like, comment, or share, it then goes out to their network. And it's not abiding by the targeting that you chose. This usually happens in smaller quantities, it might be like, you got 20 leads, and then you get one that's viral. And then if you see a seniority that doesn't match what you're targeting, but you go, okay, it was only one of 20. It sounds like this is happening to a good percentage of them. So that might not be it. I would also check your targeting and make sure that you're not excluding, rather than including people of seniorities. I've seen that happen a couple times. And also realize that the way that seniority works on LinkedIn, people can have multiple seniorities. So it could be that you're targeting, let's say, VPS. And LinkedIn thinks that they are a VP at one role, but then they're an individual contributor at another that could happen to. You might want to check your definition of what LinkedIn considers senorities to be versus yours. Like for instance, I would look at a doctor or an attorney who runs their own office or practice and I would say, oh, they're probably owner, partner, C-level, some kind of mix of those. But then I look in LinkedIn and LinkedIn calls them directors. So be aware that maybe what you call a certain seniority might not be what LinkedIn calls them. 41:12 And Efrat Dekel asks, "What's the minimum list size I can use in practice in LinkedIn website retargeting ads?" Efrat, you need at least 300 people that LinkedIn has identified within the last 180 days. So that's the absolute minimum. Although I would say if you're advertising to any audience that only has 300 people in it, you might as well not run it, because that's not going to produce very many leads. Although, of course, I'm sure that targeting is going to be great. And the caveat here is that LinkedIn needs to actually identify these people. So let's say you have 600 visitors to your website, but 100 of those aren't LinkedIn members. So LinkedIn wouldn't be able to identify them, so they're not going to make it into your audience. And then let's say half of that traffic, is using an iOS device like iPhone or iPad, or Safari browser or Mozilla. And so they make it into the audience, but then their browser just throws the cookie out. And now they're no longer part of that audience. So you might find that even though you sent 600 people, LinkedIn still saying you're too small to actually advertise to these people, because you're under the 300 person limit. In practice, usually need to send six or 700 people to your website before this becomes large enough to use. 42:27 All right question by Annie Rose. She says, "Most of the times my ads I create in LinkedIn are incomplete due to strict violations. I would love to know what the most common mistakes and intermediate advertiser would commit in building a LinkedIn Ad, and what are the do's and don'ts?" Annie, this is truly deserving of its own episode, and I'm going to make that happen. We want to do something on policies, procedures, and what happens when you get disapproved. But here are a couple of nuggets to chew on in the meantime. Every ad at LinkedIn is human reviewed. Sometimes it's up front and you might see you're waiting four to 24 hours for your ads to be approved before they start running. But sometimes they go live immediately. And that review is done after the fact. And you would only see this happening if your ads were live. And then they spent a little bit of money and then got disapproved later. We've had ads rejected for things like being related to COVID. Dealing with initial coin offerings like crypto related things, advertising alcohol, using excessive punctuation, mentioning LinkedIn in the ad copy will get you disapproved. And also, we found this is not an explicit podcast. So I'll say any swears worse than the a word will get disapproved. Sometimes if you get something disapproved, you can get it by by just resubmitting because it can be a very subjective thing whether or not someone thinks that this infringes on a policy. The other thing you can do is you could try posting organically, and then just boost that organic post since most of the time boosted posts don't go through the same review process, at least from my experience. 44:02 Okay, last question here from Glenn Schmelzle, who's a good friend, he asks, "Do you compare the incumbents click through rate to the click through rate before saturation, or after when you're doing AB testing?" So this is a little bit complex. When you start running an ad, it's probably going to have a high click through rate at some point. And then over time, as people have seen it before, you'll see click through rate slide and start to perform worse. So he's asking when you're running an AB test, let's say you leave the winner from before and you test something new. And then you compare that A and B. Do you compare B's click through rate or cost per click with the click through rate when A very first started, or now after it's saturated a little bit? And this is a brilliant question. My answer is absolutely before because when an ad very first launches, you really get a feel for what that ad is capable of, how interesting it is. And saturated. can be affected by so many things like how active an audience is, or how long you've been running it. So I think the statistics you should care about are definitely before. However, I wouldn't suggest launching something new against something that's old. Because what happens is the thing that is new, LinkedIn looks at that as a risk, because it doesn't know how that new ads going to perform, but it does know the old one. So it's safer to keep running something that's old, not performing well, then testing something that's new and could potentially be a great performer, or it could be terrible. So what I suggest doing, if you have a winner from your AB test, go ahead and pause your whole A and your B and then recreate your A along with your new B. Then both ads and LinkedIn's eyes are brand new, and they're both going to get compared side by side properly. 45:52 And guys, I had so many more Q&A questions for you, but we're already going on too long. So I'm going to save these for our next Q&A episode that might be in, let's say 20 or 30 episodes, so keep sending in your questions, I'd love to feature you. Alright, here comes the episode resources for you. So stick around. 46:15 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 46:26 I mentioned several great resources throughout this episode. So check them out down below in the show notes. There was Datanyze and BuiltWith that are really good for finding out which companies use certain products. I also mentioned a whole bunch of episodes like Episode 10, Episode 17. If you're not already caught up, definitely go back and listen to those those are absolute gems. And if you're new to LinkedIn Ads, the best course that you can take is the one that I did with LinkedIn on LinkedIn Learning. It's called advertising on LinkedIn. You can't miss it. There's a chubby ginger dude pointing at you smiling, that's me. And all I can say is the price is right. I think it's $25 for the course, if you're not already a LinkedIn premium member and get it for free. And it's the same information that I would teach you, if you hired me for $500/hour to train your team one on one. So I highly recommend that one. Next, make sure you're subscribed to this show, look down, hit the subscribe button if it's not already hit. And do rate the podcast because I want anyone who sees this and is considering to give it a listen. And then please do review it. Every review helps and I totally want to shout you out. So whatever podcast player or service you use, leave a review for the show and I'd love to read it out. As always, email us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with any show ideas, suggestions, feedback, or topics we should cover. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources: Data from the study Little Easter Egg hack - each embed you see for a chart, you can flip through the GDS charts. There's an extra I didn't publish. LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Show Transcript: What happened to LinkedIn Ads during the COVID-19 pandemic? Is there an opportunity for you as an advertiser? Spoiler alert, yes. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. So I've gotten lots of questions from advertisers during the COVID pandemic, asking about what's changed. We definitely noticed the impact. So I've been telling people kind of shooting from the hip, like, oh, 5 to 10% drop in cost per click. 0:38 Well, I decided to actually dig into the data. And what I found is there's much more to the story, and I'm super excited to tell you all about the impact, but especially the opportunity for you as advertisers. In the news, not a ton has changed recently on LinkedIn Ads, but in personal news, it's the summer and our air conditioner went out. We spent three days in the dark with all the windows shut. No one allowed to open a window or a door just to keep the house from getting to the 80 degrees or 27 Celsius like it got on the first day we realized that it wasn't working. You know, there's something wrong when your butter is a pool rather than a cube. And of course, everyone's excited about spending a bunch of money on a new air conditioner during a pandemic. That was sarcasm. A review to highlight here thatch_o said "best marketing podcast". "This is the best marketing podcast hands down. As a PPC marketer, I want to improve upon my LinkedIn ad skills. AJ is not only very knowledgeable on the topic, he's an engaging speaker and makes learning more about LinkedIn ads entertaining, easy and fast. This podcast has become one of my very favorites, and is a must listen." thatch_o, thank you so much for submitting that. That warms my little ginger heart. I've said this in the past but the way I approach this podcast is thinking of all of you as listeners like you are a member of my team. And it really is a masterclass on LinkedIn ads. I don't hold anything back and I train you just as if I would train the members of my team. It makes me so happy when I find that people like you are getting a lot out of this. And it is helpful information. So thank you, and everyone else I want to feature you. So please, whatever podcast player you are using, write a view, and I'd love to feature you here. Okay, without further ado, let's hit it. 2:18 COVID-19 has had a strong influence on most of the major ad platforms. I've heard from multiple large Facebook advertisers that cost per click and cpms have fallen by like 30 or 40%. And one big advertiser even told me that YouTube ad inventory for them decreased by 80% at one point. So we analyzed the data from $1.5 million worth of spend across almost 2,900 campaigns. So it's a large data set. But certainly, if LinkedIn released something like this, it could tell a more complete story. Or of course, if any of you listening have access to a much larger data set, let me know we can collaborate. But here's how the analysis went. We ingested the 1.5 million in advertising spend and segmented them out by ad format and bid type. And we analyzed the differences in both average cost and average click through rate for every day from February 1 to August 28. And the goal of this was just to find insights. When were engagement rates high and low, when we're costs high and low. And what we saw was especially interesting around the costs because we saw average costs decline from February to April, and then have rebounded and some even fully recovered. 3:33 Results So now we're going to go into the results and I'm going to share with you what we found, which I found really interesting. And if you're like me, and you listen to podcasts really sped up, I listened to podcasts at two and a half times speed, then this might be a part where you want to slow it down just so you can get a feel for the metrics because we're going to throw out some percentages. Overall we found cost per click to drop about 2.9% from February to March. And then they dropped another 25.2% from March until April. So looking at the platform, overall, it drops 28.1%. And those are costs per click. If you click on the link down in the show notes, it'll take you to the post where you can see charts. And you can see what this drop looks like and then what the recovery looks like. And I'll do my best to describe it to you over words, even though I'm not what I would call wordsmith. And then in May, we noticed a recovery of about 11.5%. And then that recovery, even though there was a little bit of a drop in July, kept going all the way through August the end of our data set. And the net result of this is that we're currently as advertisers paying 13.4% less than when we started before the pandemic. So to me, this spells opportunity. I love buying ads at a 13% discount. But then the story goes deeper here because we started breaking it out by individual ad type and what we found when we were looking at just sponsored content ads, we noticed a similar very large drop, 27.7%. But they've only recovered about 6% since that drop. So what I'm telling you is the most competitive inventory on LinkedIn is currently running at a 21.7% discount. And of course, since the platform overall is at a 13% discount, and sponsored content is at a 21.7% discount, that means that the other ad formats are either dragging that down or reversing it. And this is true when we broke out the other ad formats and looked at their data. Text ads are currently costing almost 18.5% more now than they did in February. Dynamic ads currently cost 17% more than in February, and the sponsored messaging ad formats, which are message ads and conversation ads, are now costing almost a 38% premium compared to that of February and granted the majority of our data set is sponsored content, that's the majority of what we run. But we're still talking 10+% of the data being dedicated to each of these ad formats. So it sure looks solid to me. And I'm not exactly sure what would cause sponsored content to get abandoned so much. But text ads and dynamic ads and sponsored messaging to get adopted so quickly. I would have guessed that text ads and dynamic ads because they're only on desktop would actually get more inventory, because so many people working from home on their computers all day and not using their mobile devices because they don't have to worry about their boss seeing them on LinkedIn or a social network. But the data is telling us that these ad formats are actually more expensive, which is crazy. 6:42 Okay, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into what we found by each individual bid type. 6:47 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. 6:57 If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you, B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $130 million on LinkedIn Ads, and no one outperforms us on getting you the lowest cost per lead. And we're the only media buying agency to be official LinkedIn partners, and we don't have a sales team. So you'll deal directly with LinkedIn Ads experts from day one. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to chat about your campaigns, or heck, send a carrier pigeon. Our mission is always to make you look like the hero. 7:28 All right, let's jump into the differences that we saw by bid type because this was really fascinating. And again, refer to the charts that you can see here in the post that I linked to in the show notes. If you've been listening to the podcast for a while, you know that there is a significant difference in the costs on LinkedIn, depending on your bid type. So if you look at these charts, you see pretty much exact opposite charts for those who are bidding CPC versus those who are bidding CPM. And what we've done is based off of the bid type, we looked at your effective cost per click. So no matter how you were bidding, what your cost per click ended up being. And advertisers paying my cost per click are currently still buying LinkedIn Ads at a 14.3% discount. While advertisers who are paying CPM are currently paying 49.4%, more than before the pandemic. So, the lesson here is that the majority of advertisers should be bidding CPC and not using auto bidding or CPM. They're being way overused, and it's causing them to pay significantly more per action. As you know, from listening to Episode 06 about bidding and budgeting, a low CPC bid strategy is cheaper than auto bidding about 90% of the time. And I think the simple reason why so many advertisers are using these inefficient bid types is that auto bidding is the default bid type when you build most campaigns. So advertisers who don't know better will oftentimes just go with the default. So when did we see these costs start to drop. Well, what's so interesting is that I was expecting a precipitous drop right in the middle of March, when advertisers were starting to come to grips with the reality of impending business closures and potential global recession. But check out this heat map picture that I've got in the post showing daily performance for all of March. And what we see is that costs really didn't start to drop until the 23rd of March. We see cost per click, we're definitely in the eights. And you'll see them in red because this is a scale of red are the highest CPCs and green are the lowest. And it starts to go yellow around the 23rd and 24th of March and goes green for the rest of the month. And I think this makes sense because B2B companies tend to move a little bit slower. So it looks like companies waited a little bit to cut their budgets back and actually made those cuts later in March, and certainly early April, as we definitely saw costs really drop in April. So takeaways for you, I think LinkedIn advertisers are buying at a 13.4% discount right now. So if you're on the fence about investing or increasing budget, this is just a great time to do that. And surprisingly, the less competitive ad formats have actually increased in cost. So they're not as advantageous a buy, but sponsored content being still down by 21.7%. That seems like a great discount. So any of you who want permission to run sponsored content, you've got it from me, that's for sure. Another takeaway here is that too many advertisers are bidding using either auto bidding or CPM rather than cost per click, which is less efficient the majority of the time, and it looks like most advertisers really held steady through most of March, and then the big budget withdrawals happened during April. I want to ask a favor of you. If you know anyone who manages LinkedIn ads, or has an extreme interest in them, please share this post with them or share this episode, or both. I would absolutely love to see this information get into the hands of all those who are advertising. And with that being said, I've got the episode resources for you coming up. So stick around. 11:16 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 11:27 Okay, so of course, the big resource here is going to be the link to the study that I did. So you'll see that it's B2Linked.com/blog/COVID-19effectonlinkedInads. Don't try to do that from memory. Just go to the show notes, or just navigate to the B2Linked.com blog and click on one of the latest posts. And there is a little easter egg hack for those of you who are sticking around. I embedded these charts into the post through Google Data Studio. And I just realized that in Data Studio, you're not limited to just the individual page. And there were some extra charts that I didn't publish, but created. So if you're interested, just flip through there on any of them and just check that additional info out. If you're new to LinkedIn ads or have a colleague that you're trying to train, definitely check out the course that I did with LinkedIn Learning. The link is, of course down below as well. And it is either free or $25, depending on your LinkedIn subscription. And it is by far the best training resource that I've seen out there for LinkedIn ads. And it's a heck of a lot cheaper than hiring me to train your team individually. Look down at your podcast player right now and make sure that you've nailed that subscribe button, and then please rate the podcast. Obviously, I'd appreciate five star,s but whatever. And do leave a review because I would love to shout you out here on the show. And of course, if you have any feedback, any questions, any topics you'd like us to cover here on the show, email us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, I'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives!

Show Resources: Brand and Demand Playbook Why Every Startup Marketer Should Be Using Conversation Ads Get in touch with Ryan MacInnis: Twitter – @RKMAC or LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryankmacinnis/ LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Show Transcript: There are four LinkedIn Ads, ad formats, and 11 plus variants of them. LinkedIn figured out the right combination to use, and they just shared it with us. 0:14 Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. 0:23 Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. LinkedIn just published a really valuable playbook, which contains absolutely prescriptive recommendations about what combinations of ad formats to use, and when for maximum effectiveness. Today I sit down with Ryan MacInnis from LinkedIn Product Marketing. He's going to share his research that he and his team just published. Ryan is over sponsored messaging as an ad category and shares with us some of his excellent insights. So without further ado, let's hit it. Ryan MacInnis, thanks so much for joining us. I'm excited to have you here on the LinkedIn Ads Show. 0:57 Yeah, thanks so much AJ for having me. I appreciate it. 0:59 Oh, of course and super excited to get to chat about the new playbook that you guys just released. I know you've been working really hard on it for our listeners. So this is Ryan Mcinnis. He's in the New York City Office for LinkedIn. I'm assuming not during COVID times you're working out of the Empire State Building. 1:14 That is right. Yeah, no, I'm actually in Connecticut. So I can see the city, but I'm not currently working in it. 1:21 Perfect. Get away from the hustle and bustle. 1:23 Exactly. 1:24 And Ryan is over the sponsored messaging product in Product Marketing at LinkedIn. So super excited to get to ask him all these questions and hear an internal response. Awesome. Okay. A very first question. Ryan, tell us about you. You know, what are you into personally? What do you love about work? What are you responsible for? Give us all that good stuff. 1:45 Sure. Yeah. So I actually started my professional career as a Boston Globe sports journalist, and that was in the end of college, beginning of kind of my professional years and I was covering high school and college sports. So I fell in love with storytelling kind of early on, and was exposed to B2B marketing from there. And I spent a lot of time attending startup events, realized how hard it was to take something that was really complex and position it in a way that not only explained what it was or what it did, but made it really clear to somebody, I'm like, what value they could get from it. So that's how I got into marketing and more specifically, product marketing. And talking about sponsored messaging at LinkedIn, it's really a situation couldn't have been any better for me. I've spent the last five years or so running early stage marketing teams at startups, whether it be the first in marketing hire, or leading a team where the company is less than 100 people, messaging and chat bots and whatnot, were a huge part of our marketing strategy. So aside from doing the really early stage startup stuff, I spent a little bit of time at Twitter on their product marketing team for the developer platform called Fabric that was eventually sold to Google. And yeah, even though I had that big company, express I still do consider myself an early stage marketer, since a lot of the skills you know, the frameworks and go to market efforts have been super helpful in scaling conversation ads, which was a new format we launched back in March. So that's kind of me professionally, me personally, big into sports. I used to be a basketball referee, a high school basketball referee. So spent a lot of time doing that. And yeah, love reading as a former English major, I guess you're never former you're always an English major. But I do like to spend a lot of time reading and kind of disconnecting from a lot of the nonfiction business world. 3:36 Well, I love that you have experienced as an early stage marketer, you also have experienced in product marketing at larger companies. So I think that puts you in a really unique position to understand your advertisers, which we'll get into here in a few minutes but this is why I'm so excited to have you like showing us this playbook. This is super exciting about the playbook. So I know you told me in the pre-show chat This has been your three plus months in the making. share with us the story behind it. Tell us about the new new playbook and why you decided to tackle this kind of project. 4:07 Yeah, so I'll first just kind of talk about what it is. And I'll bury the lead on that. So it's our new brand and demand playbook. And really what it is, it's a combination of tactical advice on how you use our different ad formats in both feed and messaging, along with our newest features such as retargeting together to help you achieve your goals on LinkedIn. And then it's also a source of inspiration. Kind of the second half of the playbook are nine customer stories that not only share the successes in the tactics on how advertisers featured used something like carousel ads and single image ads along with message ads, but you can get a snapshot into what their framework is for how they deployed these things. And so you get everything from the creatives that they use the quotes from the people who really went went big on this and believe that this is gonna be a big part of the strategy. And then you also see benchmarks and results. And so what we wanted this playbook to be for the first time, is the ability to kind of tell that cohesive story of how do all of these formats that marketers have available to them today on LinkedIn, how do they play best together? And how do we recommend which formats to use based on which stage of the funnel you're trying to engage your audience and then also give people you know less about us and more about the successes of our of our customers? How do we give them enough of that true playbook so they can learn and seek inspiration from some of the best marketers doing it today? 5:31 Yeah, and what was the pain point? I'm assuming you guys were hearing customer feedback, people expressing a need or a pain, wanting certain kinds of information. How did you decide to even come out with this playbook? Yeah, I guess let's start there. 5:48 Yeah, definitely. So when I joined obviously conversation ads had just launched and we had more recently launched you know, video ads and retargeting was coming up right around the time that we're starting to think about this playbook. And we had conversations around how there really wasn't much advice on how to use these formats best together, even though we were seeing really good results from advertisers that were. And so it was solving a problem that many advertisers on LinkedIn, they kind of go into their strategies saying, this is the piece of content I want to promote. Here's the one format and I was personally guilty of this as a B2B marketer previously to and then you judge the success of the content based on how well it did there in that format without thinking about how other kind of like supporting cast members can help lift that up, ie, you know, text ads, or video or things like that. So what we're really trying to do is help advertisers be more successful and we believe that it wasn't until we had all of these things like the most engaging ways for you to capture someone's attention in video and conversation ads. And then of course, with retargeting and being able to really dig in and tap into that behavior that you were able to understand a bit better. You could actually figure out how you would connect the dots between running an ad in the feed with really trying to drive conversion and messaging, for example. So it was a really kind of a call that we wanted to answer on how we could help advertisers get more out of the tools that they had access to, even if, you know, some of the lines weren't super clear on what they can do with them. 7:20 And Ryan, this is awesome. I'm a huge believer in using other ad formats together to really multiply your efforts. And I didn't come to that understanding until I was in a quarterly business review with one of our clients. And LinkedIn gave us a report that said, here's how people click on your sponsored content ads, who haven't seen another ad format from you. And here's how they click when they when they have and it was like a 30% lift and I went, ah, there's the value. You may not see a direct ROI from any single ad format, but as you bundle them together, it starts completing the rest of the story. 7:57 Definitely. And to your point, exactly. I think it's helpful for a lot of marketers to understand not only the context of what somebody is doing or thinking about when they're on LinkedIn, maybe they're there to just passively browse. They're there to learn from their peers. Or maybe they're saying, hey, this helpful piece of content, or this webinar is going to help me get that next promotion in my career or, you know, make me a better, you know, insert job title. But the other thing that I don't think a lot of marketers realize is that everything that you're doing in the feed because it is the kind of most prime real estate you have on LinkedIn is essentially providing context and warming up people that you want to have as customers or convert on a big activity that you're promoting. So anything that they see in the feed is kind of contextual relevance for anything that they may see in their inbox. So if I were to want to promote an event, like we were talking about a few weeks back, like carousel ads in the feed to promote some of the speakers and so if I'm in the feed, I know that hey, this company is has this event coming up. I know that the speakers will be there and then maybe in my inbox because we can be a bit more targeted and tailored to an individual person, we can say, Hey Ryan, we know you're in Product Marketing at LinkedIn and this is a pain point that we think you're really going through right now. This is why you should attend this event, use our lead gen forms, and you can register right then and there. And you have the context as to why you're receiving that message. And you understand kind of what the value was in the feed. So to your point, the more that you can help these things work better together, the more successful a lot of these marketers will be. 9:25 Yes, and you are in a fantastic position. Seeing all of this data, I mean, as the platform you get to see anything that was touched with a lead form. You get to see the exact conversions happening, the confluence of all of these ad formats. So you're in amazing position to actually tell what combinations of things and I'm sure you're using really cool machine learning and AI algorithms to figure this out. But you now know what's going to be the best combination. And now you're sharing that with us. And quite frankly, in the past, I've seen quite a few of the playbooks that LinkedIn has created. And I would say they haven't exactly been brimming with actionable information. And I've gotten to review this one, and it's completely the opposite. I'm actually really happy with this one. What changed with this? And is this a pattern for the future? 10:12 Yeah, I mean, I definitely think it's going to be something we're going to look to do more of. I think it's important to say that a lot of the playbooks in the past were foundational kind of owner's manual guides that you could read and understand how products worked. And they were really important just to understand the nuts and bolts before you could kind of get into the tactical How do these work together? But there are definitely a couple things, especially during our time being you know, quarantined and spending more time at home that magnified this, that made this playbook kind of look like what it what it does, that you'll read. And the first thing is that obviously we have even shorter attention spans I think, than we did before COVID-19. Especially those that are balancing homeschooling, taking care of loved ones, kids and whatnot. And then the other thing that was really interesting is that many marketers felt like there was a window of time, or maybe they could innovate in ways that they couldn't have before. When many of their competitors were decreasing their spend or moving slower than they would in the past. And so we were really hearing a lot of feedback on, hey, we know that this is a window for us to gain a competitive edge or reach an audience in a way that might be a bit unexpected given that everybody's trying to reach them through email, for example, how can we innovate on that? And then the last thing that I think was was super interesting is that, you know, as a former advertiser on LinkedIn, I think there's a lot of preconceived notions about advertising is like, especially from what you've been exposed to. So maybe you only understand a sliver of the products that we offer, or you only understand a little bit of how we talk about targeting and how you can reach kind of the right persona within the right company that's really important for your ABM efforts. So that was kind of the behind the scenes thinking that went into this no nonsense approach, which is if I were a B2B marketer, and I needed something that was easy to digest during this time when everybody wants my attention. How can we create a piece of content that would be valuable for them? 12:05 Ryan and I think you nailed it. Thank you for that. As you were working to create this brand and demand playbook, I'm sure you were looking through a lot of different research. What do you feel like is your biggest bombshell that you experienced in researching? Was there anything that just stood out like a sore thumb? 12:23 Yeah, it's funny you use the word bombshell. Like I don't think it can be any more obvious to a lot of people once they've done it themselves. And once they've read the playbook, which is the opportunity cost of not using feed and messaging together is just enormous, right. And I think many advertisers are advertising just in the feed, which obviously is the most competitive real estate and even though you can reach millions of people there, it's extremely hard to get someone to take an action on a lead gen form. For example, most people come to LinkedIn to explore, to learn, to do these things mainly on a mobile device, you know, and so nothing is more jarring than clicking an image and a form pops up, and that be your only chance to really engage with somebody. So I think when we looked at a lot of what made our customers successful what we were seeing, particularly with how they were using, you know, video retargeting with ebook promotion and a single image ad and how they're actually putting together their own strategies for how these ad formats can work best for them. We really wanted to drive home this feed plus messaging narrative, because we knew that kind of warming up your lead that narrative would result in a subset of your audience seeing both to your point earlier. So seeing a piece of sponsored content, and then actually having that contextual relevancy on why they should convert in the LinkedIn inbox. And so when you know more people are being exposed to that context, ultimately you can lower your cost per lead and increase your lead gen form conversion rate, which is a lot of marketers are really looking for especially during this time. 13:54 Oh, I love it. And then this may be similar. I don't know you tell me if this is the same as bombshell, but what do you feel like was your biggest takeaway, or the biggest takeaway you'd suggest for advertisers after now having been through the playbook? 14:07 Yeah, I think obviously, we talked about my first big takeaway, which is that the formats work best together, not in silos. And it's no secret that the majority of advertisers are looking to advertising the feed first and kind of messaging is an afterthought. And we're really trying to do is change that narrative and saying, how can messaging be a bit more of a not just a supporting cast member, but you know, maybe a second leading role and how you think about a particular audience. So that was kind of the biggest takeaway that I think a lot of people when they when they read the playbook, we'll see how prominent messaging is within each stage of the funnel and how we recommend using it, or even within the success stories at the end, a lot of our customers are using message ads and single image ads or video single image ads and message ads. And so there's a very healthy mix on how they can be powerful together. But, I think the other takeaway that many people will have is that there are so many people you can seek inspiration from and the willingness of these marketers who so graciously approved for a lot of their creatives and their strategy to be put in this playbook. They're great models for people to look at. And the best part is, is maybe 30% of them have similar tactics, like it's pretty unique the way that these marketers are thinking about it. So that's the biggest takeaway, aside from how these formats work well together, is that there's so many marketers who are doing this well today that you can seek inspiration from and coming out of it, not only will you have a better idea on how you can use these different formats and targeting facets, but also based on what industry, what region you're in, where you are in the world, kind of which story resonates most with you and how you can kind of seek inspiration from that. 15:46 Great! We as advertisers, I think we tend to think of each of the ad formats kind of in their own little silo. I tell people all the time, sponsored messaging ads are really good if you have a special VIP kind of offer, but don't use them if you don't have an offer that grabs them at first. And what we've found is so many advertisers have come back to us and said, hey, we actually found sponsored messaging ads to work really well as a retargeting ad for, you know, a different ad format. And it makes perfect sense. And one that I'm a little embarrassed that I did come up with. 16:23 No, and you're totally right. I mean, one of the success stories we've seen recently with conversation ads are advertisers using even if it's high intent behavior on your website, and using that as a retargeting audience for a conversation ad promoting an ebook download. You know, you wouldn't believe the successes that a lot of these advertisers are seeing when an audience has that context as to why they're being reached out to. Very similarly, with with marketers on their own websites, the ones who are really good from an automation perspective are able to give, you know prospects and people who are on LinkedIn a lot of that helpfulness. Like why are you asking me to read this message, why are you asking me to take action on this CTA and the easier you can make that decision, the better the experience, 17:08 Yeah, surrounding them so they've they've seen your brand before, they feel comfortable. There's already that know, like, and trust factor. It's a brilliant way to approach it. And then here in the brand and demand playbook, this is very prescriptive, as opposed to, I would say other playbooks or other content that LinkedIn has published before. What am I trying to say? It's much more prescriptive than other content that we've seen LinkedIn recommend before. How did you decide on the different recommendations? And I guess, how did you approach the different recommendations that are very prescriptive in here? 17:43 Yeah, that's a good question. I think as a product marketer, I look at three things on a weekly basis. The first is customer behavior. The second is sales feedback. And then the third is market dynamics, which obviously are are changing because of, you know, what's going on the world, but essentially that is what technology will marketer use today? If not tomorrow? And how can we understand like where we should be building products and making recommendations to to meet them where they want to be. And so I think for this playbook, it was the results that our customers are seeing that whereas was most important. So in my case, it was conversation as we've seen conversation ads grow a tremendous amount since launching in May, in March, rather, and I wanted to understand why advertisers were having success with it. And if they weren't, why they weren't. And for many times, more times than not, they were a result of using multiple formats together were conversation as were a key piece of that to your earlier point around how they can work best together. And so, as I mentioned earlier, like carousel ads to highlight speakers or even you know, product features, if you're trying to get somebody to buy in on the narrative of one platform to help them solve all your problems, maybe each tile tells that story or, or highlights a different aspect of your platform. And then conversation ads is a great way to get them to convert. So some of the things we're seeing you know, to be honest, is, you know, well over 50% lead gen form submission rates with some advertisers who not only are using conversation ads best practices, you know, really short, engaging content, two to three calls to action, using lead gen forms as your first CTA, but also having these formats be supportive. And what they're trying to do is, is anywhere from five to seven times higher than sponsored content alone. And so we started to pick up on what sort of behavior was most valuable to marketers that we wanted to share with even more marketers. And so the other source of inspiration as we were starting to think about this was what customers the success they were seeing with, you know, Lan, LinkedIn Audience Network and retargeting, so I'm kind of more on that, like reach in context layer. And so we took some of these findings, started to form some perspectives on which formats and targeting facets were the best for marketers to use based on what we were seeing from our best customers, and then how we watched an audience respond to it, that was really important as well. And so that's why you'll see a lot of visually engaging recommendations at the top of the funnel, like single image ads, carousel, ads, video, and even conversation ads, depending on if it's you know, kind of a brand play, or really trying to promote a blog post that is around a particular movement or whatnot. And then also, you can see, kind of towards the lower end of the funnel, where message ads or sponsored messaging is maybe more of an investment because as a prospect is lower down the funnel, there's more context, you've warmed them up a bit more, and now you're shifting to kind of the best place to have that intimate conversion opportunity, which is in messaging. So we decided on this based on a combination of what are our best customers doing today and why and then what behavior are we seeing, you know, members respond really well to LinkedIn? And how can we help marketers meet them where they want to be met? 20:47 You certainly won't hear me arguing with a 50% conversion rate. That's amazing. So for performance focused demand gen marketers, let's say testing out LinkedIn Ads for the first time. Let's give him a an imaginary budget of, let's say something like 10k, how would you approach a brand new account? Do you have any recommendations for what you'd put into which ad format and which audience and how? 21:13 Yeah, I think for performance focus dimension marketers, obviously, any type of retargeting would be extremely valuable. So if you've never advertised on LinkedIn before, that's totally fine. Maybe you're using some of our conversion tracking on your website. And so you can definitely plug in some of the high intent behaviors as audience types that you would like. So people who have converted on ebooks previously, or visited pricing pages or other high intent pages that you find valuable, and then for 10k, I really think you can get a lot of value right now with conversation as I'm not just saying that because I'm the product marketer for it. It's definitely a format that is the most delightful way possible to receive an ad right now. And what I mean by that is you have 500 characters or less to explain to somebody why you want their attention. You give them the ability to provide context, additional calls to action if they're just not quite ready to convert as opposed to you know, message to your point. An exclusive offer it's binary, either you convert or you don't. Conversation as are definitely a bit more informal. And you can, see a lot of great results for not a huge investment right off the bat. And then of course, we're talking about brand and demand, we're talking about feeding messaging, link text ads, dynamic ads, any way that you can kind of get your, your brand in the top of someone's feed, even if it's not, you know, right in front of them and in the feed itself, but on the side, kind of the right rail way of advertising. They are going to see that on LinkedIn and that is only going to help lift the conversion rates with conversation ads. So from a targeting perspective, definitely recommend an audience that is already warmed up in some capacity. And then I think for performance marketers if your goal is lead gen, obviously, that conversation ads right now paired with something like text ads, or even, you know, you can do something around like spotlight ads and whatnot. You can see really good results for for that 10k number. 23:08 Oh, beautiful. Thanks for that advice. And just digging into a little bit of what you've seen from conversation as because they are new. What are some of the best calls to action that you've found being successful with conversation ads? 23:19 Yeah, it's a good question because I think as a marketer, you're trying to understand and dig into exactly why people are behaving the way that they do. And so with conversation ads unlike message ads, you don't have a subject line, you don't have all of these great things when you can say as many words as you as you want, or at least much more than with conversation ads. And so the calls to action in the language that you use is very important. And I think what we're seeing anecdotally is is kind of this like passive and friendly way of using these call to actions particularly around lead gen forms. So if you are promoting an event, instead of register now, maybe it save my spot or you know, like, sign me up sort of thing. And I think that most people tend to look at these call to action is very formal. So I connect with a member of our sales team or download now it's like get your free copy, like get your free copy is a lot more informal, a lot less intimidating. And so from a CTA perspective, we always recommend you think that you're having a conversation with a friend or a colleague. And if I was trying to get you to read the playbook, I wouldn't send you an email and say, you know, click this link or, you know, click this button and download it now, I'd say, you know, like grab a free copy or something like that. So I definitely think a lot of the things that marketers are seeing success with an email right now and the language that they're using can definitely be transferred over to conversation ads. 24:47 Excellent. So how would you recommend dividing budgets between, let's say, the feed, messaging ads, and even right rail, do you have a rule of thumb that you'd follow? 24:58 Yeah, I mean, I don't have have anything prescriptive or I'm not going to at least try to make any of those recommendations here, but I would just kind of recommend based on what the goal is, if it's more brand focused, I definitely think investing a bit more in the feed makes a lot of sense with video with single image ads, really trying to understand the behavior of somebody on LinkedIn, especially with video retargeting now, so watching more than 25%, more than 50% and using that behavior to send them something more enticing. I think the feed is extremely valuable. And then I think as you move down the funnel with your audience, making sure that messaging is as much of your strategy as sponsored content. So sometimes that's 50/50 for people that I've seen a ton of success with sponsored messaging, but it should least be kind of that 70/30 60/40 split when you get towards the bottom of the funnel, or at least in that high intent consideration phase where you're trying to get someone to download an asset, attend an event, or things like that. Because we definitely see that people will give sponsored messaging and try, but compared to the amount that they're investing in sponsored content, I think that this playbook will help them think about it as more of a pillar of their strategy. 26:11 That's perfect. That's exactly what I think everyone here wanted to hear. So kind of going into back to your personal or business life here. What are you most excited about or looking forward to coming up right now? 26:23 Yeah, so obviously, this playbook is probably the thing that I've been looking forward to most. But I think much bigger than that, going to sponsor messaging specifically with conversation ads. I'm excited about getting a lot more of my former colleagues in the startup space, kind of this mid-market marketer to give conversation ads a try. I think the perceived notion that LinkedIn is an expensive place to advertise isn't wrong for people that don't have a strategy that helps them use all these things together really well. So you're not using retargeting Not thinking about kind of a very intimate audience and we're startups. And you know, smaller marketing teams fall in as they think that this is a place that's kind of unattainable for them to advertise. And that's not true at all. And so we have a blog post, that by the time this podcast comes out will be live. It's called why every startup marketer should be using conversation ads. And it's kind of like an open letter to myself, which is, if I had conversation ads, obviously, in previous roles, why should I be using it? What are some of the success stories we're seeing from a lot of these scrappy marketing teams that are trying to use their budgets really effectively? So I'm excited for more of these smaller marketers or those with a bit smaller budgets to really find a ton of great value out of conversation and specifically, and then how LinkedIn can be even more impactful for them. 27:50 Great, and we're going to link to the why every startup marketer should be using conversation ads down in the show notes will also link directly to the Brand and Demand Playbook. So all of you can can consume this and even follow along. So that's fantastic. Congratulations on the release of such an awesome asset. By the time any of you are hearing this, this should be available. So obviously Ryan and I are talking before it's fully released, and it's a big burden on his shoulders, and that will be lifted on Tuesday. So that's great. Yeah, Ryan, this has been fantastic. Just getting feedback from you and hearing really how marketers can better use the ad formats in tandem with each other. Do you have anything else you'd like to share with us or anything that LinkedIn advertisers should be paying attention to? 28:34 No, I think there's a lot of great things that we're coming out with from a product perspective, I think, you know, LinkedIn live and events and things like that are gonna be something we're gonna continue to invest in. If you are a conversation ads customer or you want to try it. We just came out with a new reporting feature called Flow Chart that I'd love to, you know, kind of plug which gives you CTA level, engagement, understanding verse similar to how you would think about it. Google Analytics or where people are dropping off in your conversation. And so I would definitely ask you to to look at that if you're thinking about conversation ends, or you want to understand how this new format can be helpful in your goals, because you're gonna learn a ton about the behavior of somebody in the inbox that you never had before. So that's gonna be great. 29:18 And I have definitely gotten a chance to check out the flow chart view of the conversation ads. And that was a brilliant addition. So thanks so much for that. And with that being said, thank you so much for being on the show, Ryan. Sure. Appreciate your insights. And is there any way that you'd want listeners to connect with you? 29:37 Yeah, sure. I mean, if you're active on on Twitter I'm at @RKMAC, or I'm on LinkedIn, you can you can find me there. 29:45 Perfect. And I'll go ahead and link both of those down below in the show notes. Ryan, thank you so much for being on the show, and we'll look forward to hearing from you soon. 29:53 Perfect. Thanks so much for having me, AJ. Appreciate it. 29:55 All right. I hope you enjoyed that talk I had with Ryan. I've got the episode resourcescoming up for you right now. So stick around. 30:07 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 30:18 Okay, the Brand and Demand Playbook that Ryan mentioned, I've got the link down there below. So definitely check that one out. I think you'll like having that one reviewed and on your hard drive. He also mentioned the blog post, why every startup marketer should be using conversation ads, I've got the link down below for that as well. It's definitely worth checking out. Ryan shared his Twitter handle as well as you can connect with him on LinkedIn. So I've got both of those links for you. And if you are new to LinkedIn ads, or you have an employee or a colleague who needs to learn it, definitely check out the course that I did with LinkedIn Learning. It's incredibly inexpensive and very valuable. And then take a look at your podcast player right now and see if that subscribe button is already lit up. If not, give it a nice loving touch. And while you're at it rate us of course, I'd love to see five stars on everything, but rate us whatever you legitimately think we deserve. And I would love to hear you review our podcast to on whatever service you're using. leave us a review and I'd love to read it aloud and help shout you out. With any show ideas, topic suggestions, any sort of feedback, hit us up at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And then with that being said, we'll see you back here next week, cheering you on inyour LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources: Episode 03 - 2020 Roadmap Watch the webinar Episode 16 - Ting Ba announcing Events and Live LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Show Transcript: LinkedIn Ads Roadmap Update for the second half of 2020. Here's the exciting stuff you can expect to see in your account soon. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. 0:21 Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. So back in Episode 03, I walked you through the LinkedIn roadmap for 2020. And I'm sincerely decently surprised by how much has actually happened, considering the Covid disruption. I'm genuinely excited for these developments. And I can't wait to explain why. We'll also cover what's new in your account right now so that you can start to test. But first, some further ado. So in the news, the biggest thing I've been hearing about is advertisers mentioning that the ads tab moved off the company page. And many of you may know this is how we spy on our competitors. We go to their company's pages and click on the ads tab. And then you can see the last six months of sponsored content ads they've run. And I actually noticed this last week and said, oh, man, it looks like LinkedIn, taking things away. It's a strike for privacy. But then a couple people over both Twitter and LinkedIn mentioned that it's still there, you just have to scroll down further into the post section. And there you'll see a little button for just looking at the posts that are ads, so they integrated into the rest of the feed. This is actually a better place for it. But I do wish they would have like, told advertisers about this move happening so that we didn't worry that everything was being taken away. A couple of cool reviews the highlight, Todd-Ohio says "extremely informative. AJ holds nothing back and is truly an expert on LinkedIn ads." Todd, thank you so much for leaving that. That means a ton to me. And then CocoPodcastSuchti says "absolute best podcast on LinkedIn Ads. AJ's podcast is incredibly insightful and helped me so much with optimizing my own LinkedIn campaigns. I love that AJ gives honest recommendations and also talks about the points that he doesn't agree with on LinkedIn." True. "In my opinion, the absolute best podcasts on LinkedIn Ads. Thank you so much for this AJ, please keep it up best from Berlin, Cosima." Thanks so much Coco. I appreciate that. I definitely gonna try keeping this up. Like I've talked about on previous episodes, the workload required to put one of these episodes together is really high. And I'm already quite busy, but I have every intention to keep rolling out high quality stuff. Okay, anyone listening, I want to feature you. So please review this podcast on whatever podcast player you use, you have access to, especially if I know you, I'd love to give you a shout out. 2:40 Okay, with that being said, let's hit it. 2:42 So just recently, Candace Marshall, who I call a friend at LinkedIn. She's the product marketing manager over the ad formats. She got to hop on a webinar, talking about the upcoming roadmap, as well as the recently rolled out features, and just in case you'd missed that webinar. I want to hit all of the highlights here. If you'd like to go watch the full webinar yourself, go down to the show notes. I've got a link where you can sign up and watch it. But let's start with what's new on the platform, what you can look in there and expect to see right now, In Q1 of this year, they rolled out new interests. And we actually got 28 new subcategories for things like home appliances, wearable tech, mobile tech, and a bunch of others. And Candace also gave some insight into how they pull this data, how they determine what makes someone interested in a topic. She mentioned, they pulled data from reads, likes, shares, influencers and topics that they might follow. And she also mentioned that they're inferred based on profile similarities of other similar folks to them. And she didn't mention the Bing Ads integration. But in I'm assuming this is still the case. They would also take if they had your Bing search history, they would use those topics to also inform your interests. So that may have changed and it's likely not huge data set anyway, but interesting nonetheless. We've talked about this before, but they also released the company targeting. So there's two new types of company targeting. One is company category, which is curated lists from LinkedIn, Fortune, Forbes, and probably a lot more to come. This is a really valuable resource for those who are looking to target just specific sizes of companies. And those who are really the movers and shakers in their industry. There's also the company growth targeting, where you can target by percentage growth of company, which is really, really cool to me. They also released contact targeting where you can now target by device ID. So those of you who have device IDs from your programmatic advertising, now you can upload those and get to utilize them on LinkedIn inventory. We've talked about this how we get retargeting on engagement, so anyone doing video view, or lead form opens or submits you can now retarget or exclude, one of my favorite things, based off of those actions, and she recommended 50,000 video views in the last 90 days, or 1000 lead gen form opens in the last 90 days for their algorithms to work properly, which was really helpful to understand the scale needed for their algorithms to really optimize. Candice also mentioned that message ads and events and some other engagements like company page visitors are coming. Next is with the LinkedIn audience network. Now we're actually going to have a full episode about the LinkedIn audience network, probably here in the next couple months. But like I've mentioned before, LinkedIn is pretty tight lipped about the types of websites that your ads might show up on if you enable distribution on the LinkedIn audience network. Candice mentions a couple others which were really interesting. She mentioned New York Times and Business Insider. Add that to the other ones that LinkedIn released in their announcement earlier this year, where it was like Microsoft.com, MSN, and the Flipboard app. Also since June, you can actually retarget video views over the LinkedIn audience network, which is something I didn't know about, which is actually really cool. Their full integration with integral ad science is now totally complete. And this is for those of you who are at large brands who need that pre-bid brand safety guardrail on everything that you do. And they also mentioned that moat and doubleverify integrations are coming and LinkedIn audience network as you probably know, because I just talked about video on it video retargeting. It supports both single image and video sponsored content. And some great news for you video advertisers, sponsored content now supports vertical video. So rather than 16x9 widescreen now you can do 9x16 vertical video. And it's my understanding that if you use vertical video like this, it's only going to show on mobile, it wouldn't show on desktop, but I could be wrong on that one. LinkedIn have improved their previews, they call it a more accurate preview. So if they're calling it more accurate, they're not calling it perfect. But I guess it's still better than the previous of the past where we would look at them and say, okay, but I still have to see it live because I really can't trust this. And you can now delete individual creatives, which is something I didn't even know because I've always deleted creatives directly from the company's page. But this is great that we can do this within campaign manager, now. We still can't delete campaigns, still can't delete accounts. but hey, creatives as a start. In March 2020 of this year, LinkedIn released under the umbrella of sponsored messaging, conversation ads. They punctuated the value of this release by saying that the number of messages on LinkedIn, on the back end, has increased 400%. And in a survey, 89% of consumers say that they want to talk to businesses through messaging, but only 49% do. And conversation ads, if you didn't know, are kind like the chatbot experience for LinkedIn ads, where you can give people different calls to action and based off of their responses, you can lead them down a different path and basically give them more ways to convert or interact with you. LinkedIn also recently released templates, which it used to take us about 30 minutes to build one of these conversation ads because it's, it's so complex, there's so much to that logic. And now with these templates, you can really just pick something and go from there. Maybe give it some slight edits along the way and customize it. But it's a lot faster to build now. And I know I mentioned in Episode 29 in the news, but LinkedIn just released visual reporting for conversation ads, and they're calling it flowchart view. You can access this by going into your conversation ads campaign, selecting your creatives, and then clicking the flowchart button. And what you see is a really very beautiful, visual way of understanding how many people and what percentage of people are going down different paths in your logic there? I think it's called a waterfall chart or something, but this is great. It was really difficult before to understand how each of your calls to action were performing. And now it's quite visual. I love this. I'm a big fan. And if you listen to Episode 16, where we interviewed Ting Ba from LinkedIn, you'll know about how in May of 2020 this year, LinkedIn released events. And that means that for free, a person or company can set up an event and even broadcast live from it. Of course, that's as long as you've applied and been approved for LinkedIn Live. You've got to get access first. But as soon as you're approved, you're good to go. And page admins can actually invite their first degree connections as the company page. But you can't invite people as an individual, it's company only. And because of the whole Covid situation, they've actually sped up the approval process for LinkedIn Live applications. So it's now down to seven days before you hear back, whereas it used to take up to three or four months to get approved. And if you're trying to get approved, we know what they're looking for, at least at the page level. They're looking for at least 1000 page followers, and some posting of a video in the last six months. LinkedIn hasn't specified anything about what they're looking for to approve an individual, but I would guess it's probably something similar. They want to see that you've worked with video, you've posted native video, and probably that you've got a decent level of connections or following. There's also been a recent release of the reach and frequency metrics that we didn't used to get. So now you can get your average reach and frequency to help evaluate how your advertising is going. And what was so cool with this one is the reporting for reaching frequency actually goes all the way back historical. And this makes sense because it really is an easy calculation for LinkedIn. All they needed to know was unique impressions. And then they can calculate all the rest of this quite simply. But I think this is great that we can now go back in time and see what our frequency looked like at different periods. And the last recently released feature here was in the bidding and budgeting, we now have lifetime budgets, and target cost bidding for lifetime budgets, LinkedIn says that this is a lifetime pacing of whatever your budget is. And they try to show ads just when your audience is on LinkedIn. So it's kind of like day parting and scheduling, but you don't actually get control over which hours, they just try to show it probably during peak hours. And this will be interesting to test, but I'm not overly excited about it. The same thing with target cost bidding, target cost bidding, will maximize your ROI based on the cost per click that you want to pay. And call me old fashioned, but I just don't understand the problem of bidding a certain amount and realizing that I'm going to pay let's say 10 or 20 cents less than that. But the value of this target cost bid. If you bid $8.75 per click, then you will end up paying $8.75 per click. So we've done some testing on this one and we ended up paying 20 or 30 cents more per click, because we were actually paying what we were bidding. But we didn't actually see additional traffic, it seems to us like it's just bidding and then rounding our costs up. But admittedly, this has been a pretty limited test. So I'd love to hear from you if you're seeing the same thing. If anyone's gotten target cost bidding to work well for them, please let us know. And also if you're one of these advertisers, that this was a really awesome release for you. I would love to hear why I'd love to hear what makes target cost bidding so much better than just paying a little bit less than what you're bidding. Alright, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into what's coming up for the rest of the year from LinkedIn. 12:53 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. 13:03 If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you, B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $130 million on LinkedIn Ads, and getting you the lowest costs and the highest quality of leads is our focus. We're the only media buying agency to be official LinkedIn partners. So you know, we're doing something right. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2linked.com, to chat about your campaigns. Or heck, send a carrier pigeon or smoke signal. No matter how you get in touch, we'll make sure we make you look like the internal hero. All right, let's jump into the upcoming roadmap. 13:37 LinkedIn Live & LinkedIn Events So the first category here is LinkedIn Live and LinkedIn Events. Now, obviously, most of this is done on the organic side of LinkedIn, but there will certainly be tie ins to the ads platform, the ability to sponsor some of these things to target audiences in the future, so this is why we want to pay attention to them. And personally, I'm really excited to use something like LinkedIn Events and LinkedIn Live to put on a live webinar, or even like a summit. And then just like we promote webinars now through LinkedIn Ads, we can also promote an event. And maybe this converts higher than it would be just from normal sponsored content. We'll see, I'm excited. LinkedIn says that we'll be able to download our event registrations. As of right now you can see who attended and who expressed interest, but there's nothing you can do automatically from there. But in the future, we'll be able to download that list, kind of like you can with a webinar currently. And in late 2020 or early 2021, we're going to get the ability to sponsor a LinkedIn Live with Ads. And who knows how that's gonna perform from a cost per attendee standpoint, but I'm sure excited to test. And of course, we'll get to use LinkedIn lead gen form ads for gathering these registrations, which means we'll get higher signup rates, and also the ability to retarget anyone who opened, but didn't fill out or excluding those who've already filled out. And then we'll also get the ability to retarget event attendees, they'll become an audience that we can either include or exclude. So that's a fantastic use of engagement retargeting. And the way that event notifications will work, LinkedIn says they will let the prospect know seven days ahead of time, and then remind them again three days, and then the day before that your events coming up. And we don't know if this is going to be like an email that goes to them reminding, or if it's just if they happen to be on platform, they'll see it or maybe a push notification on mobile. But I do love the fact that there will be some sort of notification to try to increase our show rates. 15:42 Stories Ads And if you listen to Episode 28, when we interviewed Michael Stelzner, we mentioned there would be LinkedIn stories, and even stories ads. LinkedIn says that the second half of 2020 is when LinkedIn is going to release stories, these real time experiences to all users And they're already live to certain users. For instance, if you are in Brazil, France, the Netherlands, or Australia, you've already got access to this. But as they ramp up and roll out to everyone, I bet there's a lot of millennials and Gen Zers, who will rejoice. They say to expect stories ad formats in Q3. So we're getting pretty close to that. And if you're wondering what it's going to be like to sponsor story ads, I would say go check out Instagram and Snapchat and see what that's like because obviously those are successful and LinkedIn is probably going to use them as the model. I would love to hear what you guys think would be a great type of story to sponsor when we get this ability. Things like a behind the scenes or look how we're working from home during COVID. Sharing news, they will have stickers as well. So those might be some ideas of what you can do. But I'd love to hear how you guys are planning on using it. Stories are not something that I've played with a whole lot on the other networks like Instagram and Snapchat, so this is really a new world for me, and I'm looking for any ideas I can get. One thing that I'm really excited about with LinkedIn Story Ads is I think this is going to be brand new ad inventory all together, it's possible that this will just be another sponsored content post. But it's not in the other networks. And so if we have brand new inventory created, a new slot on the page, then especially right at the beginning, it won't be competitive, we'll probably get to bid the very floor, whatever that is, and still fill our whole budgets worth of traffic. So that'll be fantastic. 17:38 Audience Insights And if you listen to Episode 23, where I interviewed Sam Fonoimoana, we talked about how LinkedIn was going to be coming out with an ABM dashboard, like a company engagement report that you could see right within campaign manager. And this is going to be launching in sometime Q3 in 2020 this year. It's going to be free and you don't actually need to spend anything on LinkedIn Ads to get it. And I think it will be an update to the demographic reporting the free reporting that we get now. And I really hope they call it LinkedIn Analytics or something like that. So people think of it of using it alongside that of like Google Analytics and Facebook Analytics. Now, if you use Sam's report, you'll get all the interaction from every single known company, you can get thousands, I'm fairly certain that through this new reporting, you'll probably only get access to, you know, maybe 20 to 100 at most. So if you've already gone to Sam at Stoke analytics, you've still got a better product than you'll get from LinkedIn. But we'll see in Q3 when it launches. We'll get to see a demographic composition of the audiences. We'll get to see by content, what that audience most cares about, as well as engagement metrics to see how each segment of that audience is engaging. 18:53 Document Ads And then in Q4 of 2020, LinkedIn says we'll be able to monitor and optimize our sales pipeline. With CRM integrations, so the way I see this working would be an integration with something like Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce and HubSpot. You'll be able to pull those offline conversions in and know how many, let's say marketing qualified leads and sales qualified leads those campaigns drove. And I think this is a brilliant move. I've been telling LinkedIn for years they needed to do something with a CRM because wow, the value of LinkedIn Ads is in the lead quality, it's not in getting the lowest cost per lead. I'll step off that soapbox now. Organically, we've had the ability to create document posts for quite a while now. And these actually perform really, really well organically. And now LinkedIn says that we'll be able to create document ads sometime during Q1 of 2021. With the document posts right now, you can post a PowerPoint presentation or a PDF or a Word doc and it's kind of like a carousel ad where people can scroll through each page. And I have high hopes that when this becomes a document ad, will be able to use this for an immediate transaction of content. So I'm thinking things like ebooks and white papers and case studies. Maybe there's a lead gen form, where as soon as that's completed, the person is automatically given that piece of content. And on the back end, we don't have to get our marketing automation system to gather that email address and send it off to their inbox. It would be so cool if we could just deliver it automatically. And LinkedIn does say that there will be a beta later this year. So if this is something you're absolutely desperate for, get with your LinkedIn account rep right now and request access to that beta. 20:44 Products on Pages The next release that LinkedIn mentions is called products on pages. And this is kind of like a G2 Crowd kind of competitor, where you're going to be able to go to companies pages and leave reviews on their products. They also mentioned something thing about individuals being able to demonstrate proficiency. So maybe if let's say you are like a HubSpot Pro, you could somehow get some kind of a connection to the HubSpot page or product with your review. The beta is going to be launching. And actually, I think the beta has already launched it was in the first half of 2020. So maybe some of you listeners are already part of this. I know I have at least one friend who's part of it for a large European brand. And I wouldn't be surprised to see this actually release out to everyone right at the beginning of 2021. But who knows they've been releasing things really rapidly lately, and maybe we see it later this year. 21:39 AB Testing/Split Testing This next release I'm really stoked about they're calling it AB testing or split testing. And I'm sure as many of you know, you can currently go into a campaign and set your creatives to either rotate evenly or optimize to click through rate. And in the past I'm sure you've heard me say, as attractive as It sounds to want to rotate your creatives evenly, it's a really terrible thing for your ad performance. I call it the charge me more and show me less button. And the reason why is when it rotates your ads evenly, what it's doing is it's entering both ads into the auction evenly. But of course, both of them have different relevancy scores. So the one with the higher relevancy score will get a higher number of impressions at a lower cost. And the one with the worst relevancy score, it's still going into the auction, but it's losing a lot more often, meaning that you're not getting those impressions that you're hoping for. And when you do, you pay a higher cost per click for them. So with this new release that they say is coming in Q4 of 2020, you'll be able to compare the performance of two campaigns that differ by one variable. And apparently the reporting will be based off of statistical significance, which is really cool. I've asked LinkedIn several times how this is going to interact with LinkedIn's auction? And is it possible for LinkedIn to kind of gloss over the fact that these ads and variations are going to have different relevancy scores? I haven't gotten a definitive answer, but I'm sure closer to release, I'll have some more information to share about that. 23:16 Campaign Manager Lite The next release is one that I'm not super excited about, but I definitely understand the value here. They're releasing something called Campaign Manager Lite, which is kind of like a really simplified version of campaign manager, where you can boost posts directly from the company's page, kind of like you can on Facebook. And this is really simple for those marketers who may not be as familiar with PPC advertising, but they still want to take organic posts and event posts and easily sponsor and extend their reach. That'll actually be out pretty soon. They they're saying Q3 of 2020. And of course, anytime you try to take a complex advertising product, like campaign manager and make it lite, it's probably just going to take away a lot of options and control. So chances are I won't be playing with this very much, but I definitely understand the value for advertisers who may not want to jump into campaign manager and learn all of these tips and tricks. 24:16 LinkedIn Business Manager And then finally, LinkedIn is releasing something that they call LinkedIn Business Manager. Now, those of us who are at agencies who work with a lot of different LinkedIn Ads accounts, this is something we've been asking for for a long time. Those of you who are experienced with Facebook ads, you know, Facebook Business Manager. And it's kind of like we're an agency can have a single entity that they get access to that entity for the ads account, and then the business can add their employees to that entity. So right now, when a client gives us access to their account, we have to go in and add every single employee. And then if and when that employee leaves, we have to remember to go into those accounts and remove that person. And this would be a lot simpler if we could just remove the person once from the company's business manager, and it would remove them from all of the client accounts. We're still a ways out on this one. LinkedIn says it's releasing in the second half of 2021. But there will be a beta early next year. So if this is something, if you're an agency who does a lot of this, maybe request that from your rep. All right, that was a lot of good stuff coming out. So thanks for sticking with us. Right after the break here. I've got the episode resources for you. So stick around. 25:42 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 25:53 Resources All right, you could actually go and watch the webinar that this was kind of a commentary on so check the show notes down below. It is lead capture so submit your information to LinkedIn and you can watch the whole webinar. The link there is down below. And then also go back to listen to Episode 03 about what's coming in 2020 and what's coming in in 2021. And you can see how much LinkedIn actually has released this year, even despite Covid. Also, don't miss Episode 16 with Ting Ba at LinkedIn, where she told us all about the new releases of LinkedIn Events and LinkedIn Live, that goes deeper into what we've talked about here. And of course, if you are new to LinkedIn advertising, or you have a member of your staff who is go check out the course on LinkedIn Learning, the link is also down below. And this is one that I did with LinkedIn that really takes you from the very beginning of LinkedIn Ads all the way through going and creating your own campaigns, and it can get someone up to speed really quickly. It's also incredibly inexpensive. It's only about $25, or if you have a LinkedIn Premium subscription, it's free. And it covers all the same stuff that I would cover in probably the first hour and a half, if you hired me to come and train your team at $500 an hour, so it's a fantastic value. On whatever podcast player you're listening to look down and hit that subscribe button. If this has been a value to you, I'd love to have you hearing more episodes. And also if it has been a value, hit the rate button. And I'd love to have this podcast really blow up and get more people hearing all the great tips and tricks they just can't hear anywhere else about LinkedIn Ads. And if you will, leave a review on whatever podcast player you listen to. And I'd love to shout you out at the beginning of the episodes. And as always reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with any questions or suggested topics for the future. I'd love to give you what you're hungry for. Alright, with that being said, I'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources: Sales Navigator LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Show Transcript: Your LinkedIn Ads used to perform great, but performance has been dragging lately. Yeah, we're talking about saturation today. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. 0:20 Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. Have you experienced the horror of your LinkedIn Ads that were performing great a few weeks ago, and all of a sudden performance is dreadful? You're not alone. We're going to dive deep into audience saturation and what you can do about it to keep your audience's engaging. In the news, as a reminder, we're going to be doing our first of hopefully many Q&A episodes, get your questions into podcasts at Podcast@B2Linked.com and I would love to field them there. In platform news, there's something really cool that LinkedIn just released for conversation ads, and it's called flow chart view. It's essentially a waterfall chart that shows you all of the different questions and different calls to action that you provide in a conversation ad, it will show you what percentage of people chose which option. And this is so cool because now we get to see very visually what people like and what they don't. And now you can tell if you've got a call to action that is, let's say two or three steps down in your tree, and it has a really high conversion rate. That could be a great reason to promote it to the very first call to action that you provide, and maybe swap your first down into the third. I checked it out. It looks beautiful. And it should have released to everyone on August 4, 2020. So if you're running conversation ads, definitely check that little goodie out. LinkedIn doesn't share with us benchmarks all too often. Usually we have to come up with them ourselves so we can see whether or not we're doing things. Well. We got a rare benchmark confirmation this week from LinkedIn. They said that on sponsored messaging ads, the average open rate is 55%. And then the average click through rate once someone has opened is 3.2%. This was great for me to figure out, because I've been telling people that average was about a 50% open, and a click through rate was anywhere between 3% to 4%. So I'm certainly glad that I wasn't that far off and that I wasn't misleading people. So check your sponsored messaging campaigns and see how your performance is doing. And certainly, if you are below or even at those benchmarks, then that could be a good clue that you need to go in and switch something up. I shared in Episode 13 about how sponsored messaging ads are the most expensive ad format on LinkedIn if you are only performing at the average. So that's why I say if you're anywhere near the average, go change something up. These ads are only interesting to me when I can far exceed the averages. We'll probably end up doing a whole roadmap update episode, but for right now here are just a few cool things that are happening. really soon. The first is that any sort of sponsored messaging ad has a really tight frequency cap of each member can only receive one every 45 days. Well, in September of 2020 this all change. It's going to be reduced from every 45 days down to 30. And I'm actually really excited about this, because I've never heard someone complain that they were getting too much sponsored inmail. And anytime I've heard someone complaining about it, they were actually talking about Sales Navigator outreach, and weren't actually talking about a sponsored message ad. So anyone who's using sponsored messaging at large scale, you're about to get a nice performance bump, a ton of extra impressions. The next road map update is we're going to get stories ads, like I mentioned in the last episode, stories have actually already been live in the Netherlands. And it's certainly not long until we get them as an ad format. I'm not a huge user of Instagram or Snapchat or actually I'm not even a user of them at all. So I'm not super familiar with the stories type of format. But I'm really excited to see what people end up doing with that on LinkedIn, I definitely think there's a place for it. Another that I'm really excited about, we're soon going to get the ability to retarget event attendees. So if you're running a LinkedIn event for something like a webinar, or let's say, a live stream in the future, you'll be able to retarget those audiences. And I'm just crossing my fingers that we'll be able to retarget audiences smaller than 300 people, because I've seen a lot of lives and events who have less than 300 people, and I'd sure hate it if we couldn't retarget unless we had that many attendees. As part of that event update. We're going to get the ability to use lead gen forms to get people to register for a LinkedIn event. That's pretty cool too. And of course, with the recent update where we can retarget form openers and form submitters, it makes it even more powerful. If you listen to Episode 23, with Sam Fonoimoana, he shared with us how he uses his tools and the LinkedIn API to show in great detail exactly which companies are engaging with your ads and what sorts of actions they're taking. Now LinkedIn is going to be releasing their own version of this. I assume it's going to be called company engagement reporting, or maybe something like an ABM dashboard. But whatever it is, I'm excited to see it. And I'm still pretty sure that Stoke Analytics, and Sam over there are going to have a more in depth report. But of course, I'm excited for anything that LinkedIn gives us that's powerful in campaign manager. 5:39 Reviews Let's highlight a couple of reviews from listeners who've been listening and reviewing Darryl Oberg, who's the owner of a wide internet marketing. He is a total rock star when it comes to paid media in British Columbia, Canada, he says "been listening to AJ Wilcox in his LinkedIn ads podcast. It covers the changes clearly and coming from Google at Facebook ads, I'm looking to promote more LinkedIn ads. Great podcast, and I highly recommend listening to it if you're considering LinkedIn ads." Darryl, you're a total stud. Thanks so much for leaving that. And then Amy McGlinn, who is a copywriting extrordiaire in New York shared "I love this show!" "For everyone using LinkedIn ads for leads. This is the show." Amy, thanks so much for the kind words I'm so glad you're getting value out of it. And you. Yes, I'm talking to you right now you with the headphones on possibly on the elliptical machine right now? Yes, you! I want to feature you so make sure you review us somewhere somewhere on the internet. Make sure that we can find it and I'd love to shout you out. Thanks in advance for that support. Okay, with that being said, let's hit it. 6:45 My friend Luca Brinkhues, I hope I pronounced that right, who is a total digital marketing rockstar in Germany. He reached out and said I'm running into an issue repeatedly. These audiences run well for four to five weeks. I'm getting a cost per lead of like $15 to $20, which is fantastic, by the way, and then the cost per lead starts to rise to $50, $60 $70 plus. As you probably know, it's the same with Facebook. But due to LinkedIn's high ad costs, I feel like the cost per lead rises much higher, much faster. How do you deal with this? Are you simply creating new ads pretty regularly? Or is this a sign that the offer is just not good enough for scale? Luca, this was a fantastic question, and one that prompted me to want to come out with this episode. So this is definitely an issue of saturation. But there are three different kinds of ad saturation. So let's go through each one. There's ad saturation, there's offer saturation, and then there's audience saturation. 7:42 Ad Saturation Now the most common is definitely ad saturation. And what this is, is people have seen your ads before, and they're kind of sick of them, in essence, because they've seen that same image, their brand tells them oh, I've seen this before, it's not new, move on. And they become banner blind to it. So as you're running ads for a while, more and more people who've seen your ad previously, are now ignoring it and scrolling past. So how do you know that this ad saturation is occurring? Well, here are the signs. If you go into chart your performance of your ads, if you see your click through rate dropping steadily over time, or if you look at your cost per click, and they are climbing steadily, those are pretty solid signs that you're experiencing ad saturation. It could even be more extreme, you could see rapid drops. This can happen if your click through rate drops below a certain threshold that makes your relevancy score drop significantly. And now even with your same level of bidding, you're not winning as many impressions in the auction, and you see your traffic just drops off or even your impressions drop off. From our analysis, we found that ad saturation tends to occur on average between 27 to 33 days, but it certainly could be longer or shorter based on the activity level and size of your audience. So for your audience, I would highly recommend, go ahead and let your ad saturate and watch your click through rate fall over time, and build your own model about how long it took for that audience to get sick of that ad so you can catch it before it happens again, next time. When you see your ad start to saturate, pay attention to your frequency metric. If you go right above your campaigns, you'll see an option there called columns. It usually defaults to columns performance, but change that to columns delivery, and then you'll get to see your frequency metric. This is the average number of times that your audience has seen your ad. We've noticed saturation occurring anywhere between a frequency of 2.3 to 2.9 and so it totally depends. Okay, so you've gone and built your model and let's say that you figured out that your audience is saturating about every 27 days. What that means is you want to set something on the calendar every 27 days, and maybe ideally even earlier to give you some time to prep. And this is when you're going to change things up, you're going to refresh that ad copy, and or imagery. Now I'm a big fan of changing your ad copy quite regularly, so that you can test the motivations that are inspiring your prospects to click. But in the case of ad saturation, the most important thing you can do is actually change your image, change it to something completely different. Because our human brains are so good at looking at an image and very quickly deciding whether or not that image is interesting to us whether the person is threatening or attractive or exciting. And because our brains react so quickly, if you want to fight this banner blindness, a lot of times you could even keep the same ad copy, but just change the image and then people will end up giving your ad a second Look. And of course, you can notice things like your click through rate starting to drop, or your cost per click starting to climb. And it might not actually be saturation. It could also be something like a major competitor entering into the auction and starting to crowd you out, but there really isn't much that you can actually do about that. Or if you know any way to actually do something about that, please let me know privately. But because you can't really act on that, we'll just assume that it's always saturation. Funny story, I once got in trouble with LinkedIn for talking about ad saturation. This was several years ago and it was because they felt like it put them in a bad light. The funny part about it is I'm admittedly very critical of LinkedIn on many things. But ad saturation is actually one of the things that I absolutely praised LinkedIn for because it's so much easier to manage your ad saturation on LinkedIn than it is on Facebook. This is because people on Facebook tend to spend 30 plus minutes per day, but they're only lost into LinkedIn like once per week. So there's much less of an opportunity to saturate your audience when they're only seeing your ad, even if you're bidding aggressively, about once per week on average, whereas on Facebook, they could be seeing it multiple times per day. And you can burn an audience out really quickly. I mentioned that on LinkedIn, it's about every 27 to 33 days when saturation occurs on Facebook, it's oftentimes between seven and 10 days if your audience is quite large. So because of that, I am so grateful that LinkedIn is not the platform that people go and spend all day long on because it makes it really easy to control and predict. 7:42 Offer Saturation The next type of saturation and this one is the next most common is offer saturation. And if you remember from Episode 10, your offer is really your lead magnet, your call to action, whatever you want to call it, it's what you're offering your customer in exchange for their attention. Now this happens because people have been seeing the same offer repeatedly and they no longer either perceive it as new, or perceive it as interesting or valuable. It's essentially old news. And of course, you as a marketer who worked really hard putting this asset together. You don't want to feel like it's old news. Don't worry, if it performed well at one point it's likely going to perform well again in the future, you just need to give people a break, because they're sick of it right now. In order to tell that we're experiencing offer saturation, what we're usually watching for is if we've tried refreshing either ad creative or copy three times, and no matter what we try, we can't get click through rates back up to around where they were when the offer was new or when the last round of successful ad copy was new. That tells us people are probably tired of the offer. There's only so much that we can do to the actual ad copy to try to get their attention when they've seen this same webinar, the same ebook several times and they're no longer feeling compelled to go towards it. This type of saturation is tough, because we know that creating a whole new offer, a whole new call to action takes significant time and a lot of cases, so plan ahead. If you know that your average offer is going to last, let's say, one to three months, make sure that you're always working on your next offer so that you can swap it in as soon as you see saturation occur. Saturation of the offer can look like a drop in click through rate because people aren't as interested. But you'll also see the people who do click, maybe some of them are the same ones who've already clicked before. And they remember they've already seen this or converted or decided not to convert, and you'll notice your conversion rates can actually drop as well. 14:40 Hey, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into the least common and the most dangerous kind of saturation. 14:46 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. 14:56 If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you, B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $130 million on LinkedIn Ads, and getting you the lowest costs and the highest quality leads is our focus. And we're the only media buying agency to become official LinkedIn partners. So you know we're doing something right. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to chat about your campaigns. Or heck, send a carrier pigeon. No matter how you get in touch, we'll make sure we make you look like the hero. 15:27 Audience Saturation Alright, let's jump back into the most dangerous kind of saturation. And this is the least common and this is audience saturation. Now, I hope you are not experiencing audience saturation because this one is not nearly as easy to fix. What this is, is people now recognize your brand. And no matter what ad copy or imagery or video or offers you throw at them, they're looking at your brand and saying, oh, I've heard of them before. I've seen them everywhere. This isn't worth my attention. When we see audience saturation. occur, it's usually because a company has been advertising heavily to an audience for 2, 3, 4 years. If you are experiencing audience saturation, the best thing you can do is actually take a break from advertising. I would advise you to take advantage of something like a COVID outbreak, where people's minds really aren't on the platform or advertising or business in general. But if you can't predict the future, like I certainly can't, November and December are really good times from my experience to withdraw yourself from the auction. They're the most expensive times of the year and by far the least performance for my experience. But let's say that you are held to a strict lead goal and you can't just pull out of the auction and stop spending for a month or two. In this case, you will want to do anything you can think of to shake things up in a big way. Make a stir or make the news. Either one will will potentially work really well here. Now we're talking about saturation like it's a really bad thing because, of course, it's the harbinger of kind of some poor performance. But you can actually harness this and control saturation for your own good. The way that this works is your target audience, let's say it's 50,000 people. Of that 50,000 people, you might have 20,000 who are near daily users of LinkedIn. And let's say 10,000, who log in once every couple weeks, and then the other 20,000 is somewhere in between. If you're using sponsored content ads, you can make sure you only have two ads active in each campaign. And what that's going to do is put you on a really strict frequency cap, where your ads can only be shown to any individual member a max of once per day. So what that means is, the more active people in your audience will likely not saturate very quickly because they're not seeing your ads very often. And the least active ones obviously won't anyway, and so the effect you get is this very even saturation. The other ad formats are significantly harder to saturate with because first of all text ads and dynamic ads are on desktop only so it's only what 20% to 30% of your audience are even going to be eligible to see them. But text ads and dynamic ads also borrow inventory from each other. So they'll switch up pretty regularly. And of course, like we talked about earlier, sponsored messaging can only be sent to someone once every 45 days, or once every 30 days after September of 2020. So if you're going after an evergreen audience with sponsored content, I highly recommend two creative PR campaign so that you, at least as evenly as possible, saturate this audience slowly and regularly. But I hear some of you asking, but AJ, what if you want to saturate your audience? Let's say you've got a webinar coming up, or an online summit or something that is seven days away, and you really want to make sure that you get in front of your audience as often as possible to remind them of this event that's going to be over soon. So this is a great strategy to get in front of your most active users often to remind them of what you're doing. If you want to actively saturate this audience as much as possible, what you'll want to do is put five ads in that campaign. The reason why this works is LinkedIn has a rule that one unique creative can only be seen by one person every 12 hours. So if you have five unique creatives that can technically qualify you to have five impressions from a single audience member within a 48 hour period. So this is the most you can saturate an audience. And I think that's pretty cool. Although truthfully, it's not something I do super often that's really only in the high urgency cases, like we talked about in Episode 21. We also see quite regularly that when we launch a new offer or a new campaign, sometimes we'll see conversions go crazy for the first few days, and then all of a sudden conversion rates drop. For a long time, I wondered if this was some sort of saturation occurring, but it was happening so quickly over a matter of days and I couldn't imagine that audience being so active that they were tired of this offer after just three or four days. What we've discovered is this is usually a sign that there was latent demand in the marketplace, and you've reached all those who were actively waiting for your product or service or information. And this is usually a very good thing. You just captured the most excited people in your audience who've been just waiting on pins and needles to see what you're offering. Alright, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up, so stick around. 20:49 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 21:00 Resources Okay, here's some great resources for you. If you are new to LinkedIn advertising or have a colleague who is right in the show notes below, you'll see a link to the course that I did with LinkedIn Learning all about LinkedIn ads. And this is fantastic. It's only an hour long, and it's altra inexpensive. If you've got LinkedIn premium, it's free. Or if you don't, it's only $25. And it covers all the information that I would present to you one on one, if you hired me for $500 an hour to come and train your team. So I highly recommend it. It's a great one. Something else that's interesting, we don't talk about the organic side of LinkedIn very often here, but many of you may be familiar with the Sales Navigator tool. This is what sales teams use to do outreach. I actually secured a link that most of the time they offer a 30 day free trial if you just go right to LinkedIn, but I actually got offered a special 60 day free trial link. And so that's below too if you and your sales team happened to leverage Sales Navigator or want to start, check out that link to get an extra month for free. On whatever podcast player you're listening to. Please hit that subscribe button if you want to hear more deep LinkedIn Ads info. And also look for the stars where you can hit rate or and or review. I'd love to shout you out for leaving a review. So definitely hit us up there. And then if you have any episodes, suggestions or questions that you want answered on our Q&A episode coming up, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com and we'd love to give you exactly what you're looking for. All right, I'll see you back here next week, cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources: 2020 Social Media Industry Report SME's Facebook Summit Social Media Marketing Podcast LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.   Show Transcript: Only 23% of B2B Marketers use LinkedIn Ads. We interview Michael Stelzner, founder of Social Media Examiner to find out that and more. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. I am absolutely brimming with excitement today, because I get to introduce you to my guest, Michael Stelzner. He's someone I'm blessed to call a friend and a mentor. And he needs no introduction, but I'm going to give him one anyway. He's the founder of Social Media Examiner, which is the resource for social media marketers to stay up on industry changes. He's also the host of the social media marketing podcast, to which I'm a subscriber and have never missed a single episode. It's got over 400 episodes, and I've even been a guest twice. He also hosts Social Media Marketing World. The mega conference for social media marketers in San Diego every year. And as a side note, this is one of my favorite conferences to attend and speak at because it's the first and only conference with a dedicated LinkedIn track. Finally, some love for LinkedIn. He's a mentor to many of the biggest names and social media and constantly has his finger on the pulse of all things social, which is why I'm so excited to be talking to him today about the industry report he recently published and how LinkedIn fits into the entire social media ecosystem, plus an exclusive announcement at the end. So stick around just a short news segment today. Just a reminder, I'm going to be doing the first of many q&a episodes here coming up in the next few weeks. So get your questions into Podcast@B2Linked.com and I'll make sure to feature your question. Okay, without further ado, let's hit it. 1:51 Hey, Michael. So great. You could come and join us here on the LinkedIn Ads Show. 1:54 Thanks so much for making the time. 1:55 AJ, it's absolutely a pleasure to join you today. 1:58 Well, I am in storied company here. I feel like you are the father of the whole social media industry. So I'm just quite honestly very flattered you've considered to come on the show. I call you a friend. And I'm really excited for the stuff that you're going to share with us today. 2:12 Well, it's been great to work with you and become your friend over the years. And I'm really really honored that you also calling me the father because I'm definitely not the father. Probably this one of the jokers, but happy to bring whatever wisdom I can to your audience for sure. 2:27 When the jokers bring the wisdom, it's a good castle. 2:30 I guess first of all, how are things been going for you during the whole COVID situation? I mean, tell us personally how things are. 2:37 Yeah, well, as you know, you got a chance to come out here and film inside of our studio during COVID. And it was pretty quiet here in the building. Most of our staff are working from home. Things are uncertain like we for sure don't know for example, if we're gonna have a physical conference because as of this recording, California is kind of not looking so good with COVID, which we won't know for a while and that's kind of unnerving to not know about your future. But you know, I'm a believer that whenever you are dealt a deck that you don't expect that there's opportunity in there somewhere. And I believe in innovating your way out of struggle. So we have just used this as an opportunity to be super innovative. You know, that phrase, the mother of invention is necessity, right? So like when you need to do something is when you do stuff that you never thought you could do. And that's what's exciting for me is, I believe, incredible opportunities coming as a result of this, and we're just kind of figuring our way out, but we're not pessimistic. We're very optimistic about the future. And we're just excited to see what tomorrow holds for sure. 3:38 Well, and like I mentioned in the intro, you are the creator of the mega conference for social media. This is Social Media Marketing World and I counted a huge blessing personally, that you were able to put on the 2020 show, basically right before all of the COVID shut down happen. So I'm amazed that that was the one show I got to go to. 3:56 Yeah, that was crazy because I think everybody became aware it was March 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, right? So literally the very first American who died of COVID was up in Seattle on like, the second day of the event. And all of a sudden, everybody's like, Whoa, what's happening here? And then, slowly but surely, people began to realize this might be the last big conference that I'm gonna be at for a long time. And indeed, that happened. So yeah, we were really blessed to kind of be there during that experience. And, and it was just a surreal, really neat opportunity that was granted to us and hopefully, we'll be able to do it again in the future. We'll see. 4:32 And anyone who has not yet been able to attend Social Media Marketing World, I will tell you, I speak at probably 15 to 20 events every year. And that is by far my favorite. Like if I knew a pandemic was coming and I could choose one show to speak at before everything shut down for five months, that would have been the one. So thanks for making that happen. 4:50 Thank you, AJ. 4:50 So I know you just I'll say recently, but this was in May, you came out with this massive report that you do across all social media every single year. So it's the 2020, social media marketing industry report from Social Media Examiner. First of all, how long have you been doing the report? And why do you do it? 5:08 Well, thank you for mentioning that. Yeah, first one came out in 2009. So this is I think, the 12th annual report, if I'm not mistaken. So we've been doing it non stop every year for 12 years. And it's been really fun for me to survey thousands and thousands of marketers, I think we surveyed this year over 5000, marketers all over the world, in B2B and B2C. And it's just been really exciting to kind of see how they're changing where their trends are. And we look at everything from use of video, to use of social platforms, to future use of social platforms, to objectives and benefits of social media and a million other things and we give it all away for free in about a 50 page report. We use it internally to help direct our editorial direction and of course, decide what topics to talk about on the podcast and what kind of things to have at our conference. But you know, a lot of people in the world use it to also do some of the same things like we've already had 25,000 downloads on that thing. You know, we're recording this just a couple of months after it came out. 6:08 And for listeners who want to go and look at this report while we're discussing it, yes. Can you tell us where can we find it? 6:13 Yeah, socialmediaexaminer.com/report2020. 6:18 Perfect. All right, make sure you go get your copy. We're going to be talking about specific points in here that you'll probably be interested in. 6:23 Yeah. And it's free. 6:24 Yeah, exactly. And oh, boy, I'm so glad that it helps dictate your editorial direction that you guys can use it. Because I know it's valuable for us, we get to take a temperature of, you know, how do people feel about LinkedIn specifically? 6:35 Exactly. 6:36 Did you have any really big bombshell realizations from the data this year? I mean, was there anything that just punched you in the face? 6:43 Everything just kind of at a macro level, changed a little bit like across all social platforms, a lot of the benefits went down across the board, which is one of the things that I kind of thought was interesting, but still, you know, and the benefits of social media that we asked about every year are things like generating leads, generating sales, all that kind of stuff. And still, for the most part, more than 50% of marketers said, actually, more than 59% of marketers said, it improve sales, developed loyal fans, generated leads increased traffic, and increased exposure. So it's still like the top benefits are there. But the benefits that started shrinking are, for example, providing marketplace intelligence, growing business partnerships. I think this has to be a bigger part of what social media was back in the day. Because back in the day, there weren't as many social platforms like Twitter was it and Facebook and you could tweet somebody and all of a sudden they'd be open to talking to you, you know, those are, those are kind of different days, right? 7:44 Oh, yeah. Love Twitter. 7:45 Yeah. So everything went down a little bit as far as the percentages but I wouldn't say anything, like struck me as absolutely shocking. Not at all. 7:53 That's really interesting. And do you feel like the COVID situation influenced any of this? Do you know how much of the data collection happened during quarantine? No, this was all collected pre-COVID. But I will tell you, we did another content study in July, just for internal purposes. And we we asked some of the same questions and not all the questions, but a lot of the things have held the interest in the platform's hasn't changed the order of the rankings, all that kind of stuff. So if anything, I think COVID has increased. For example, we just recently had Mark Zuckerberg report on his earnings call literally just yesterday. And I think if I'm not mistaken, the use of Facebook has gone up by 11%. Meaning the amount of time people are spending on the platforms. So I think what COVID has done for the social media platforms is increased usage and activity, because people are stuck at home and they want to socialize and where else to do it but on the social platforms, right? So COVID has turned out to help the platforms. I don't think it's hurt them at all. 8:53 Yeah, I've seen the same thing with LinkedIn. We've seen our impressions, our engagement go up across nearly all of our clients. So I feel like Facebook jumped 11%. LinkedIn probably did too. 9:03 And speaking editorially, we've seen jumps across our editorial channels as well. So I think the interest in learning how to use social platforms has increased as well. Because the old traditional ways of doing speaking and local events and all that stuff are obviously not able to happen. So those naysayers who have been eh, social media is just for them young kids right? Now they're all of a sudden, oh, maybe I better learn this stuff. 9:30 Which is a good thing, because it's a very powerful side of our digital marketing tool set. 9:34 Yeah, exactly. 9:35 You mentioned that you surveyed both B2C and B2B right. The first chart I want to ask you about is if you're following along page 14, where it's talking about platform use for B2C marketers. And of course, I'm not surprised at all to see that Facebook's at 96%. 96% of B2C marketers are using it, but I actually was pretty surprised to see LinkedIn at 50%. So I guess my question to you if you have the insight, yhy do you think B2C marketers are showing interest in LinkedIn? What kind of draw does it have for them? 10:05 Well, first of all, it's a really fascinating question. So just to give you some quick data for everyone who's listening, Facebook is used by 91% of B2B marketers, followed by LinkedIn at 81%. And 50% of B2C use LinkedIn, but only 4% of them say it's their most important platform. Facebook is used by 91% of B2C marketers, okay, that shouldn't surprise you, right? But a big chunk of them use LinkedIn also, okay. Now, when it comes to B2B 46% of B2B marketers say that Facebook is their most important platform. Okay, followed by LinkedIn. So almost half of b2b marketers, say if they could only choose one platform, they choose Facebook. And then 33% choose LinkedIn. So this was a choose one right? Here's all the platforms 46% said Facebook. And then 33% said LinkedIn of B2B marketers. Right? So that's the question, right? Why so much interest in Facebook? Right? And I think that it's part of a bigger dialogue, which is, Facebook is used by everybody. Okay. So if we think about this for a second, Facebook is the platform that the world is on. And there's billions on Facebook and there's hundreds of millions on LinkedIn. We know this to be true, right? People use Facebook, for personal and for business, right. And people use LinkedIn, probably mostly just for business. So because they already are B2B, and their friends are on Facebook. They go to groups on Facebook, it's part of their natural living. It's almost like email for them, right? So the Facebook ecosystem is so huge and so ubiquitous that the whole world uses it regardless of whether that business they work for targets B2B targets B2C. I know your next question is like, well, why? From the business side of things, first of all the ad costs are really affordable, as you know, on Facebook. Secondly, they can do super creative targeting on Facebook that you cannot do on LinkedIn, which I know you know is true. Third, live video is available for everyone on Facebook. You don't have to wait. You don't have to get selected. There's nothing signed no signups or anything right. And fourth, facebook groups are way better than LinkedIn groups. Okay, there was a time where LinkedIn has dominated. But now it's Facebook groups, right? So from a utilitarian perspective, these B2B marketers, they have groups of customers that are on Facebook. They're using live video on Facebook, because it's the only place that they can use live video because they're not been selected yet on LinkedIn. They're using it to acquire customers because they know that their customers are also on Facebook, right? So it's not that they don't find value in it. It's just that they use it. Now. This Is the distinction. You know, from the B2C side of it. If we flip the coin, the B2C side, they don't really put a lot of value in LinkedIn, only 40% of them say it's their most important platform. 50% say Facebook. And that makes a lot of sense that they would choose Facebook as their overwhelming platform. So I think what's going on here is it's just Facebook is the innovator. LinkedIn has never really been the innovator. LinkedIn has been like the ketchup boy, for lack of better words, right? Yep. About four years behind. Yeah. So I think it'd be not smart for B2B marketers to ignore Facebook. And I would I would think you would agree as well, you know what I mean? Oh, yeah. It doesn't mean LinkedIn isn't powerful. It just means that LinkedIn is different, right? So I think LinkedIn for a lot of B2B marketers is an important part of their arsenal of marketing tools. But it's not their only thing that they do. That's my thinking. I don't know. What's your thoughts on that? 13:53 Yeah, I totally agree. I get asked all the time. When I'm pitching LinkedIn to a potential customer. They'll say something like, Oh, we don't think are customers on Facebook. And I usually stop them and say, well, they are. Everyone is on Facebook, the challenge is we just can't reach them well enough with targeting by who they are professionally for it to make economic sense, you know, because LinkedIn cost per click is so high, it basically means that if you don't have a large deal size on the back end, LinkedIn is priced themselves out of the market for you. So anyone with a lifetime value of under about 10k, I tell them go Facebook and Google all day long. But if you have over that, and precision in your targeting, make sense, then yeah, you go to LinkedIn. 14:35 Well, and here's some more interesting data of the B2B marketers that we surveyed, which I think was about 40% of our survey audience, which is, you know, makes sense, because B2C is very much all over social more than B2B is 73% of those B2B marketers said they wanted to do more with LinkedIn The next year. So it's not like LinkedIn isn't important to them. They just haven't yet done as much as they want to do they want to figure it out more. I know that a lot of them are hopeful they're going to get live, right? Live video. I know a lot of them are like, trying to figure out how in the world, they could possibly make ads work for them. Right? And I'm sure a lot of them are interested in publishing content on LinkedIn, right? Because it's one of the few platforms that actually does give you really incredible reach. Where Facebook represses your reach, LinkedIn allows that reach to just explode because as you know, every time someone likes or comments on your editorial content, or your post or whatever, their friends see it right. That is so cool. Let's hope LinkedIn doesn't take that away. Right? And let's also be intellectually honest, LinkedIn feels so much more like what Facebook used to feel like that it's actually become a destination. Where I think for a lot of marketers, it became a place they just checked in and they left. I think it's now becoming a place that they go and they hang out. And I'm sensing that. Do you feel that as well? 16:04 Yeah. In fact, when Microsoft released their last quarterly earnings, they shared something that LinkedIn never shares, they actually shared how much time on platform grew over the last year. This was obviously during COVID. But they showed a 60% increase in time spent in the newsfeed over the previous year. And I don't think that's just COVID I think a lot of that is just it is it's a destination. It's a place where people come now to hang out and interact, where it used to be come back every six months to update your resume. Well, you know, and it's funny because we forget sometimes who owns these platforms, right? We forget that Facebook owns Instagram. And we forget that Microsoft owns LinkedIn. But really fascinating news that I just read earlier today, Microsoft is thinking about purchasing the US based TikToK. And that just came out with the news today. So can you imagine if Microsoft was able to somehow make that work where they owned TikTok and LinkedIn. I mean, holy cow. And it doesn't seem to make sense at first blush, right? Why would they do that, but this is a way that they can capture a younger marketplace. Think about the incredible opportunity to bring people up into the Microsoft family of products, right? They've got plenty of cash, you know what I mean? And all of a sudden, it's like, wow, this could be bringing in some really interesting, innovative technology, if they were able to acquire this from TikTok into the LinkedIn ecosystem. 16:04 Yeah, when I heard LinkedIn was being bid on by potential buyers, before Microsoft made the announcement. I just went, oh, please, please, please have it be either Google, Facebook, or Salesforce. Any of those companies could make amazing use of LinkedIn data. And then it was Microsoft. And I kind of went, ah, darn. I mean, there's some value there, but not nearly as much. Google marketers forever have been just saying they are giving us amazing tools for B2C. We've got nothing for B2B. Facebook, the big challenge is yeah, people use it for B2B, but they can't get people to reliably give them their business info. So those combined, that'd be great. But we got Microsoft, we'll make the best. 18:11 And you know, fascinatingly enough, they do have a pretty, pretty big consumer division with Xbox, right? So imagine if they had Xbox and TikTok, right? And then all of a sudden, you begin to see the connections there, right? And all of a sudden, maybe they take their gaming system, and who knows, maybe they acquire a live video company. I mean, you could just kind of see a whole consumer division of this thing, kind of fascinating diversion. But I'll let you take back control. 18:34 Yeah. And now a younger audience who are being introduced to LinkedIn with a consumer research company. I did a survey of high schoolers and college students on basically how do they use LinkedIn. And I'll be doing a podcast on this in the future. But what we found is high school students don't even know what LinkedIn is, college students go, I'll look at it when I get a job. I mean, if you can imagine something like tying in livestreaming gaming with Xbox, TikTok, I think LinkedIn would actually really benefit as those people get into high school and college and start to build a profile. 19:09 It'll be interesting. We'll have to watch how that goes. 19:11 Love it. Anyone following along to the report here on page 23. It's about future LinkedIn plans. And it says more than half of marketers, 55%, plan on increasing their LinkedIn organic activities over the next 12 months. And while 55% is pretty high, I'm seeing that it's only a 3% increase from 2019. I mean, do you have any comment on that? 19:34 Well, if you think about how we do the survey, we say, you know, do you plan on doing more or less or the same or you know, something along those lines, right with all the platforms. And when they say that they want to do more, it's a bit subjective about what those organic activities might be. So in their mind, they might be thinking live video, they might be thinking more posts. So it's a bit subjective, but it's good because the good news is more than half right, 55% want to do more with LinkedIn in an organic way. So what that tells me is that there's interest in continuing to innovate, improve, increase activities, it doesn't mean they're just going to post more, it just means that they're going to try to do more, whatever that means to them. Right. And I think that's good news. Because if it was less than half, then that would be probably a negative indicator that would show that they're not so excited about it anymore. So the fact that it went up a little bit is actually not bad at all. 20:33 Okay, that's great insights. On page 29. We see that b2b marketers are far more interested in learning about LinkedIn. That is 72% of b2b versus 52% of b2c. I think this reasons I think it makes sense. 20:47 I'm with you, 100%. But I think it's interesting that 52% of B2C want to learn more about LinkedIn. That's the fascinating thing here, right. And maybe we should just talk for a little bit about that because I don't think we really did go into that right. Why would B2C people even be interested in LinkedIn. You willing to talk about that for a little bit? 21:03 Oh, hundred percent. Yeah, that was actually one of my questions. I'm curious, like, what is the draw for them? 21:08 Well, I think that we're starting to see it become almost an influencer site like Instagram. And I think we're specifically seeing this a lot with the female influencers on LinkedIn, like, especially in the in the business world. I think we're starting to see a lot of people use it as a blog platform where they can just post short form videos. I think we're also starting to see people just post what they're doing in their life, right. And it's almost become like a little blog, for lack of better words, right? Like, this is what I'm doing. This is what I'm struggling with. This is my story, right? Yeah. And it's not surprising, because anywhere you have the opportunity to write a story. And people follow you. You have an opportunity to build a following because I've been around long enough and you've been around long enough that this is how blogging started. Right? Yeah. In the beginning, it was people telling stories, right? It was stories of their life, right? Now this has moved on to social platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn. So if people are going on there, and they're in the B2C world, like fashion or home goods or whatever, and they want to establish themselves in a predominantly male dominated platform, let's be honest, right? If they can go on there as a female, and they can do something that stands out from everybody else who's doing pure business related content, all of a sudden they have an opportunity because there's not as much competition. Right. And we're seeing this with a lot of people. Like we see this with some people go on there and talk about politics, which is definitely B2C, some people go on there, and they talk about whatever they're an expert in. So they're using it to draw an audience to them for a consumer facing kind of thing, but they're using it in a way that is, I don't know how else to say this. Technically, it makes sense. But culturally, it seems a little off right? Because so much of the platform has been linked to my blog posts about business related topics, right? Discussions around business related topics. But the moment people talk, start talking about personal stuff on there all of a sudden, hey, these are just humans talking to humans and that stuff works. Have you noticed that this is starting to become a trend? And some people are getting traction with this? 23:16 Yeah, absolutely. I've actually gone through the same thought process myself. If I have to go to one platform and share something, when I share on LinkedIn, it gets 20, 30, 50,000 views. If I go and share on Twitter, I haven't checked my analytics recently. But I would imagine I get less than, I don't know, 200 views on a tweet. And so I don't even think about the culture of what are these networks I'm posting on, I think of I have limited time, where is my audience, and I'm probably going to take it to LinkedIn where I have a bit bigger of a megaphone. 23:45 Yeah. And I think that the truth is that if we think about the historical pre-conception of what LinkedIn has been, which is it's a job place, right, to get a job. So when you're going on there, to get a job. You're going on there for B2C jobs just as much as you're going on there for B2B jobs. Right. So therefore, there are people that are interested in B2C industries that are in there participating. And it kind of logically makes sense. If they don't really care about the business to business topics that maybe you and I care about. And they happen to go on there thinking it's for one thing and realize it's for something else. They might come back, right? 24:23 Yeah. In fact, we find several niches inside of b2c that make a ton of sense on LinkedIn. The first is what you've already mentioned, recruiting like hiring, recruiting, anything like that, technically a B2C offer, but you reach someone by who they are professionally, so it makes sense in the B2B context. Also, higher education, like recruiting for MBA programs, for instance, is big. We've also found financial services and even some kinds of travel tend to do really well on LinkedIn Ads. So I'm looking at that going okay, 95% of our clients are B2B, but we Have some B2C that makes sense. So I guess if they make up a small part of the interest we're seeing. 25:05 Yeah, absolutely. So I think that anybody listening to this who is B2C? And is all in on all the other platforms and maybe not all in on LinkedIn or maybe they feel like they can't talk about certain things on LinkedIn, I would just say experiment, right? What do you get the list? Let's see if I can get some traction. 25:20 Yeah, I would tell people try to avoid politics and religion, if you can. Try to avoid pictures of you on the beach, you know, holding your drink of choice. But outside of that, LinkedIn sharing is very Facebook. And, you know, people just sharing here's what I ate for breakfast. I've seen that do well. So I think that's good advice. 25:38 Yeah. But if you show a picture of you on a beach drinking and you're in the business of trying to get consumers to go to the beach, and drink, then go for it, right? 25:47 Yeah, then that makes plenty of sense. 25:51 I've also found that if you share something that's personal, but you just bend it towards business. I've seen our mutual friend Dennis Yu does this quite a bit. He'll show Something's just personal about his life. And then he'll relate it to how it taught him something about how to run his business BlitzMetrics. Yeah. So I think even if you're just sharing what you had for breakfast, steer it in the direction of what you're doing professionally and chances are people aren't gonna beat you up over it. 26:15 Good advice. 26:16 All right,let's talk about video platforms, page 36 talks about the video platforms that marketers want to learn more about. And I think my first question for you here is, what is the draw in social media video? And then who's using it? And how is it most used effectively? 26:33 Well, first of all, video is absolutely huge. Let me address this from a couple different angles. Let's start with LinkedIn in particular, and then I'll go to the the bigger draw. I think that there's a big opportunity for video on LinkedIn. First of all, you've got live video, if you can get it. It's amazing for creating engagement. But even uploaded video is also something that you know, as long as you keep it short, right, it's something could be very powerful. But I think the opportunity for LinkedIn is if they ever come out with a stories based thing on LinkedIn, it would be huge. Just like Facebook, and Instagram, and Snapchat, and TikTok all have stories. If there's a way that LinkedIn could roll something like that out, I think it would be absolutely huge because what it would allow is part of this bigger trend, which is authentic raw Day in the Life, here's the experience that I'm having. Or here's the event that I'm at, or here's how the sausage is made inside the factory, you get where I'm going with this right? Or here's what it's like to work at this business. The fact that it can be just done from a phone instantly in seconds and doesn't need to be perfect is blowing up on all the other platforms. It's huge. So if LinkedIn ever does and I I'm almost willing to bet money, they're they're considering it behind closed doors, you know, I'm sure they're probably like, when are we going to come out with stories? When are we going to come out with stories, but if they do that it would be absolutely huge. Now to the bigger question is what is it about video in general on all the platforms for the most part, but especially Instagram and Facebook, it's a huge opportunity to develop empathy and connection with an audience. Because when they can get to know you, and begin to like you and trust you, that kind of reduces that barrier of wanting to do business with you, right? And I think that the key thing is that most video consumption on the other platforms is like 15 seconds or less, right? So that's where the story stuff like this is where the story is, is blowing up on every platform because it's short, highly consumable, and it tends to be linear and it's kind of a story environment where each one builds on top of the other and it's super easy to consume. I think that that is really, really big. And I think that LinkedIn for sure saw the value of video with the uploaded video right? And I'm sure you use it and a lot of other people use it. Live video is starting to become really popular. But I do think that video is the future. If we step back and ask why is video the future. Let's think of this in light of this pandemic, have you been watching more or less netflix....? Since the pandemic happened? 29:08 Yeah, me personally, it's been about the same, but I know a lot of people... 29:11 How about the rest of your family? 29:13 Yeah, they're spending definitely more time in front of the TV. Yeah. 29:16 Yeah. So you think about this, right? You've got all these streaming platforms that are coming out with amazing quality content, right? And it's next to nothing, right? Or it's free in the case of Amazon or, or if you happen to like, you know, have an AT&T internet connection you can get HBO max for free. I mean, or Disney+ is next to nothing, right, it's so cheap. So what you have is you have this incredible high quality content that the world is watching on their television, their smart TVs, on their phones, everywhere, right? So the world has become consumers. The whole world has become like expecting that I don't have to go to the movies anymore. I can get better quality shows with the click of a button and I can binge watch them and be highly entertained, right? So when we think about that, and we transition over to YouTube, which is the business opportunity, I think for so many of us, is YouTube. And I talked about this at my keynote at Social Media Marketing World, there's this mass consumption of video on YouTube as well. And I think all the social platforms know that the consumers are expecting to be able to find high quality content that's educational, or entertainment that they can just watch, right? Short form stuff tends to be entertaining, longer form stuff tends to be, you know, in the case of our world, educational, especially with LinkedIn, generally providing value. And I think that the whole world has just gotten to the point where that's how they prefer to consume content, by watching. And that means they're reading less. And, you know, there's a lot of statistics showing people just aren't reading as much as they used to. Audio is also down a little bit now because of COVID because people aren't commuting as much as they used to so they're not listening to podcasts as much as they used to, but video has completely exploded. My guess is if we looked at the data consumption of video, it's probably quadrupled. Why do you think everybody's talking about zoom? So it's gone through the roof. So it's a mega trend now. So the opportunity, I think, for us is figuring out how to tap into it. And there are some of our friends doing it really well on LinkedIn. 31:20 Oh, yeah, plenty of them. I love what you said about just how easy it is to build that know, like, and trust factor over video. I tell people all the time. I mean, if you're trying to think of an offer that you can give through LinkedIn, it try to make it a webinar if you can, because two minutes of you talking to camera will build more know, like, and trust factor than reading five of your white papers. So I definitely agree with that. 31:45 Michaela Alexis is someone who I think has been doing a really good job. She's one of your contemporaries. What I love about what she's doing is she's she's using it for storytelling. And this is something all marketers need to think about. Like storytelling is not just a consumer thing. It's a B2B thing, right? So what makela does really well, she'll take something that happened in her life. And then she'll so a story around it right? And she'll get people to watch it, or consume it. And then she'll get a chance to talk about what she wants to talk about. And I think this is a lesson so many of us as marketers could take and use in video on LinkedIn, which is how can we sell a story? How can we take something that happened in our life and make a connection to something we are offering to our client base? If we can do that, we can we can move mountains. 32:27 Shout out to Michaela. What's up, Mick? Something else I wanted to mention, you brought up stories for LinkedIn? Message to my LinkedIn partner team, Iam not sharing this outside of NDA. This was outside of your channels. I actually had someone chat me this morning from the Netherlands, showing that story ads are rolling out in the Netherlands. I thought you might be interested. 32:48 So how can they have story ads if they don't have stories? 32:51 They have stories they actually launched stories to higher ed first. So education has had it then they built the ad unit off of it. 33:00 Oh, perfect. Okay, so stories is coming, then that's so awesome. Okay, LinkedIn, if you're listening, this is the part that frustrates us, okay? You can't just let certain people have these features forever. You need to roll them out to the world. I mean, come on. Learn from your brother, okay? 33:18 Well, that's been so interesting watching video roll out because video was already huge on on Facebook, on Instagram, before it was even released on LinkedIn. So I think a lot of people got into the habit of sharing video and creating on other platforms, but they didn't even think to bring it to LinkedIn. So you know, they're a little bit late to the party, but I think that means that there's a big opportunity for those who aren't looking past it and overlooking. On page 37. about social media ads. This is one I was obviously paying close attention to. It says that B2C marketers are likely to use Facebook ads, 74% of B2C marketers, 45% of B2C marketers using Instagram ads. B2B marketers are using more LinkedIn Ads. This is up 23%. And so I guess I'm curious, why do you think and we may have already touched on this. But why do you think only 23% of B2B marketers are using LinkedIn Ads? And what does that opportunity look like for reaching the other 77%? 34:13 Yeah, well, I think that the challenge with LinkedIn Ads, as you know intimately well, is that they are a little bit too costly, and that they are not as targetable you know, as a lot of the other kind of thing. But if we think about this, it's true that even on Facebook, the free users of all platforms is monster huge compared to the paid users, okay, so if we think about this, from a perspective, like take Facebook as the behemoth, there's only like 6 million that actually use it for advertising. That's it. Okay, out of the hundreds of millions of businesses are on there, it's tiny little fragment. So while a lot more people say that they use Facebook ads than LinkedIn, it doesn't mean they use Facebook ads every single day. It so my guess is what's really going on here is you have most people using organic on both LinkedIn and Facebook. And those that do use ads are using it on Facebook only because they probably haven't been able to figure out how to make it work on LinkedIn. That's my thinking. Like, for example, we're a B2B company, right? We help marketers working for other companies figure out how to take their, you know, goals to the next level. We have not successfully use B2B LinkedIn Ads, we just haven't. For us for what we sell, we just haven't been able to make it work. So we're probably not unlike all the other B2B companies out there, right? They're just a lot every B2B company is selling the really expensive products that have the huge profit margins and are willing to pay that high cost per acquisition. That's my thinking. 35:46 Yeah, I think that's really accurate. I mean, when you're interviewing all these social media marketers, not all of them are advertisers. So seeing a figure that low, even if someone is B2B, they may be an organic marketer and so there's no reason for them to use LinkedIn Ads, so it makes perfect sense. 36:03 Yeah, most people don't use ads is probably the simplest answer. 36:07 And those who do are probably going to start on Facebook. This is kind of off the beaten track. This isn't a question I told you. I was gonna ask. I was so shocked last year, when for those who don't know, you had this show called The Journey that was on Facebook and on YouTube. And it was basically a documentary style of what it took to put on the mega conference, Social Media Marketing World. And I was watching every episode, I I loved it. But it was so interesting last year to hear you share on your podcast, anyone who's not listening to the Social Media Marketing podcast, definitely do. You probably are, if you're listening to this one, you've probably listened to Mike's show, but you talked about how you just decided to drop the journey entirely from Facebook because the watch time wasn't there. Can you give us a little bit of insight into it? 36:54 Our old adage was distributed everywhere. So the idea was that we would take the journey and we would call publish it on Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn, and YouTube natively. All okay? Now the only platforms that provide true metrics on video really well is Facebook and YouTube. LinkedIn doesn't do a real good job with their retention metrics. So you don't just know how many people viewed it, but you don't know how long they've used it unless they've changed that, which I don't think they have. They haven't have they? 37:22 Nope. Through ads, you can see the stats, but organically, you can't see 75% or completions. 37:27 Yeah. So the challenge is, what is the view? And this is an important thing for marketers to wrap their mind around, right? A view is not a view, by the metrics we think of as a view. Facebook calls a view three seconds or longer. YouTube is 30 seconds or longer. Twitter. Nobody knows. LinkedIn, nobody knows. 37:48 LinkedIn is two seconds. 37:49 It's two seconds? 37:50 Yeah. 37:51 Okay, so think about that. And you think about the feed experience on all these platforms. They're all pretty much the same. It's all a feed, right? You scroll through it. Generally it's muted. It's playing. So first of all, it's very easy to scroll through a feed and see a video play for two or three seconds and have it counted as a view. But you and I both know that they're not really intending to view it. So you could falsely see these big numbers and say, wow, look at all the people watching my videos on LinkedIn, and Facebook and Twitter and wherever. But thank goodness, YouTube, and Facebook show you this thing called the retention graph, which means they show you how long they stick around for and they show you the drop offs. So when you actually get to that level of data, you begin to realize that Facebook looks like going off the edge of a cliff after the first few seconds. Okay. YouTube looks like a gradual downhill slide. Not even more of a hill, more of like a, sometimes it's barely declining and staying flat on YouTube. So then you begin to ask yourself, why is that? Oh, it's the behavior of the platform's. So people go to LinkedIn and to Facebook and to Twitter to discover whatever is going on. There's no intent to go there and watch a video generally speaking, but they go to YouTube to do only one thing, which is to watch video, okay? So as a result, it made a lot of sense for us to just say, we're not going to publish the journey on all these platforms anymore. We're going to publish on one platform. And we're going to link to it from these other platforms. So today, we don't have the journey anymore. And instead, we produce three original, two original videos, which AJ has got a bunch of stuff on our YouTube channel, you definitely want to check it out. Look up Social Media Examiner on YouTube, and we take those videos and cross link those. We cross link to videos from LinkedIn and from Facebook directly to YouTube. The goal is to promote to the channel known as YouTube for us, because that's where people go to watch. And it's been fascinating for me to look at the data to see that some people are watching on smart TVs. Some people are watching on smart devices, some people are watching on desktops. And the goal for us has become we want to grow that channel because that's the place where everybody goes to watch video. And we want to tap into that mega trend I talked about earlier of people consuming video, right? What's great about YouTube is it's kind of like TicTok. They go to watch one video and then the algorithm intelligently introduces a bunch of other videos to you. Those videos could be your videos, right? And people stay and they watch a lot of videos and they have a high session duration. So it's been a really fun ride for me to go all in on YouTube and just see how everything has been growing. It's a really, really well tuned platform for video. So that's why we do not publish uploaded native video anywhere at all, except YouTube. We just cross promote to it, which is crazy, but I'm telling you, that's where everybody goes for that. And there's platforms for different kinds of things. And definitely video consumption is all on YouTube. I think that's the reason why LinkedIn hasn't revealed the data because they don't want to be embarrassed by how few people actually stick around inside their videos. They just don't want the world to know. 41:08 Exactly.Yep. It's just not good on any social site, because that's not why people are going, they're not going to be specifically entertained. 41:16 Well, the only video that's good is the short stuff, right? So that's why ads inside of stories are becoming popular. Because somebody can stick around for 10 or 15 seconds. But because that's kind of the normal attention span, if you will, where they want quick, high volume, short duration kind of videos. So that's why I'm sure stories will come to LinkedIn for every lessons. 41:36 And anyone who sees a really good LinkedIn story ad for b2b please forward it to me I'm, I'm dying to see how we can use story as effectively. In my mind, I think it's a very B2C kind of ad format, but we'll see. I want to I want to be surprised. Alright, so Mike, if you were a brand new B2B company, and you don't have the same brand power because I don't know how many followers you have on every every channel, but you are world famous. If you lost that brand power and had to start a brand new company with a with a new name, how would you approach it from all social media channels? 42:09 Where would I start? 42:10 Yeah, maybe specifically, what would you do on Facebook? What would you do on LinkedIn? 42:14 Okay, so first of all, I would definitely start a Facebook group. If I was starting all over from scratch, because it's all about community. Remember, social is about people and community, right? And Facebook groups is probably the best of what Facebook offers. And the good news about that is I would go in there and start a group and it would be focused on whatever my niche is and I would try to cultivate relationships inside of those groups. Knowing of course, it's not my platform, it's rented land, but it's okay. Facebook has made it very clear they're all about those meaningful engagements. And you can develop those relationships, which everybody in the B2B world knows is so critical. So I'd start with a Facebook group. And I would also consider using ads too, because if I had the money ads can be a huge accelerant on Facebook because it can be very economical. And whether you're a local B2B business trying to get Local stuff or whether you're big national brand, I would be all in there. So that's where I would start. And then as far as LinkedIn, I would probably say, do whatever AJ says, I'm gonna turn it right over to you. What would you say? Becauses honestly, I don't even know. 43:13 Well, honestly I mean the organic reach is so good on LinkedIn for personal profiles, not as good as companies. So I think the first thing I would do is go build your profile, spend some time on it, start connecting with the right people, and then start sharing because it's really easy to stand out. Once you become an influencer, once you have a lot of followers who care about you. It's not a hard jump to get you interested in understanding in what their company is doing. But I would start focusing heavily on the profile. Okay. And I know we're running low on time, I got to get you to your next meeting. I put a question out to all of my LinkedIn followers and just said, Hey, I'm going to have Michael Stelzner on the podcast, what questions would you have for him, and I had about 15 people responding and give me questions. We only have time for one so I'm gonna highlight Charles Lightfoot III, who asked a really good question. He said, "After seeing where marketers are planning on increasing spend and which platforms they are digging into deeper, I'd be interested in hearing, what are his predictions on lasting shifts in consumer behavior on social post pandemic?" So, in essence, how does the pandemic change what social marketers are going to be doing in the future? 44:24 Okay, first and foremost, you got to get video figured out. Okay, that's the theme that shouldn't be a surprise to anybody based on this conversation. You've got to figure it out. And I would say, if you're going to do the longer form video, I would go all in on YouTube. And I would figure out a way to make that a big opportunity for your business because YouTube is unlike all the other social platforms, it has a very long tail, meaning your video could all of a sudden months after it was published began to be suggested, as other people are watching video and it might come up just as the next video and all of a sudden it could really take off. And it's ike a blog post in Google search. It's that powerful, it's crazy. So don't forget about the fact that people go and they seek out content, B2B content on YouTube, I would go there for sure. I would also check out TikTok. Believe it or not, it's blowing up. It's not just for the young kids. And I do think that it is probably going to be the next big platform that everybody's talking about. It's heavily B2C right now. But there are people that are starting to experiment, you know, with it and trying to figure it out. TikTok is the opposite end, it's the short form video, right? So if you can figure out how to create short, engaging video on the platform that people are going crazy over then TicTok. And then of course stories on Instagram as well. So I would just say like, get the stories thing figured out. Figure out how you can make that shortm form video because it's going to be the normal, it's going to be the new normal. And then just remember, people are spending a lot more time, this is the other big trend, on social media, because they've got nowhere to go. They've got absolutely nothing to do, I wouldn't be surprised if we could get this data, how many times people open up the social platforms on their phone in one day, all of them? My guess is it's at least a dozen. So I think people are just so bored. And they're so sick of being where they are that they're going on to these platforms one at a time like this over and over again. That's a big opportunity for businesses because that means that they're gonna be there more than ever before. And as a result, that means your ads have greater opportunity to be seen, there might be more ad inventory. And there's just a lot more opportunity as a result of all this going on right now. 46:34 Brilliant, Mike, that is amazing. Thanks for sharing your knowledge with us. One thing I want to kind of point out here, I would assume the majority of our listeners are managing LinkedIn Ads, but are also responsible for Facebook. And so this is probably going to be really interesting to our listeners. This podcast is going to be released on August 11. And you have a Facebook Summit happening from August 10 to the 14th. So if you're listening to this podcast around the time of releases, you've got to go check this one out. Mike, can you tell us about the Summit? What are they learning? What are they getting out of it? 47:08 Yeah, we brought together 12 of the world's top Facebook marketing experts to teach you Facebook Ads. So I'm sure a lot of you are using that to teach you Facebook Live, you know, and Facebook Live is, like I said, available to everyone to teach you Facebook groups, Facebook organic marketing. So if you want to really learn a lot more about that, which I know you do because you guys have told me you do based on the stats. This is a great opportunity to get it live to live online event, socialmediaexaminer.com/FBsummit. And for those of you that are also interested, we've got a YouTube summit that's going to be releasing. You heard it here first. I haven't told the rest of the world, but in a couple of weeks after this, we're going to have the very similar kind of thing all on YouTube. And it's going to be focused on YouTube Ads, YouTube video creation, and YouTube's algorithm and all that stuff. That'll also be 12 of the world's top experts on YouTube. So we've found that these online summits have been really very well received, and they're a very economical way. So to find that one, you'll just want to go to socialmediaexaminer.com depending on when you hear this, and you'll be able to find that as well. And I have not told anybody about that. So you're getting like a big exclusive here. Think of these events as like a series of live trainings that are also recorded. But they're all highly instructional. They're all pretty much some of the best speakers that you would see at Social Media Marketing World. And I think one of the unique things that I've got going for me as I develop a deep relationship with a big bench of experts, as AJ can attest, and these are not just anybody, these are truly the best in the world. 48:48 And is there a cost associated with the summit? 48:50 Yeah, the price is depends on when you buy. There anywhere from $247 to $497. So it depends when you get in. So if you're checking out the Facebook marketing summit, as of this dropping, it'll probably be about $500. The YouTube marketing summit, if you get in early, it would be about $250. So a couple hundred bucks, investment might end up saving you a lot of pain and suffering as you learn from these experts who have been doing this for a long, long time, 49:19 Worth every penny. Absolutely! Michael Stelzner, thank you so much for joining us on the LinkedIn Ads show. It's been a pleasure and looking forward to the next time we get to chat. 49:27 My pleasure. Thanks for having me, AJ, 49:29 I've got the episode resources for you coming up. So stick around. 49:38 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 49:49 I hope you enjoyed my chat with Michael Stelzner. As promised, here are the resources from this episode that we talked about. The first is the 2020 Social Media Marketing industry report. You can get on socialmediaexaminer.com/report2020. There's also the Social Media Examiner Facebook summit that is going on right now at the time of release. So check that out socialmediaexaminer.com/FBsummit for Facebook summit. And I mentioned Michael's podcast, the Social Media Marketing Podcast. There's a link in the show notes there. So go check that out. If you're not already subscribed, it is the top Social Media Marketing podcast, and you should definitely be paying attention to it. If you are new to LinkedIn Ads or are training an employee on it, I would highly recommend checking out the course that I did with LinkedIn on LinkedIn Learning. It's all about LinkedIn Ads and covers the basics of everything you'd want to know about LinkedIn Ads. And the price is right, it's only $25 or it's even free if you have a premium subscription to LinkedIn. Look down at your podcast player right now and make sure you hit that subscribe button if you aren't already. And please do rate and review. If you leave a review I would love to shout you out here on air. So definitely let me know what you think. As always reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with any suggestions for future content or questions you've got, and with that being said, I'll see you back here next week cheering you on in your LinkedIn ads initiatives.

Show Resources: Episode 25 - How to Optimize Your LinkedIn Ads For Better Performance Episode 06 - LinkedIn Ads Bidding & Budgeting Strategies Episode 15 - Benchmarking Your LinkedIn Ads LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Show Transcript: You've heard of agile development. But have you heard of Agile LinkedIn Ads management? Strap in, I'm gonna show you how it's done. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. 0:21 Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. So Episode 25 was all about the types of optimizations that you can make in your account to show improvement. But you've all been asking me how often you should be doing this optimization and how much data you need and how fast you can go. So I'm going to break down exactly how you can go and launch, test, and pivot with your LinkedIn Ads in a very agile way so you can move faster and conquer your competition. In the news, LinkedIn did a survey where they had just over 800 marketers across the globe kind of self report on how they'd been disrupted during the whole COVID situation and the results were quite interesting. About 10% of respondents said that their business had been totally disrupted. So this is a group who are trying to save their marketing budgets, and basically try to stay in business and not lay anyone off. Then about 70% responded that it was business, but unusual. So they're spending time on strategic planning. They've been mildly disrupted, and they're trying to figure out ways to get around and get through. But business is still going. And then you had 20%, who really said their business had been evolving. These were companies in a category that are really thriving right now. They're in a growing market. They're finding new customers, they're taking advantage of these new opportunities that the post COVID world is providing from those that I've spoken to I would say that these percentages are probably about accurate. In the survey results, they linked to a document that they call Driving ROI. And it's a set of best practice resources that LinkedIn compiled to help marketers. So I clicked on it, I read it, it was from 2019. And it is something that I'd read before but had kind of forgotten about. And I want to point out just some interesting findings here. And I've linked to this in the show notes down below. But it's called the long and short of ROI. As you consume this, you can just hear LinkedIn ranting, during the whole piece about the complaints that they hear so often from advertisers. They really come to three points here. Number one, marketers are measuring ROI too quickly. Number two, when they say they're measuring ROI, they're not really measuring ROI. And number three, internal pressures are causing marketers to move too fast and make actually poor decisions. And although it does sound like a bit of a rant, I totally understand where they're coming from. I'm sure they've had many advertisers quit where they say, you know what, we had to quit, we're just not seeing the return on our investment here. So this is LinkedIn reminding us if your sales cycle is six months long, quit complaining when you haven't seen ROI after four months of advertising. We talked about this in Episode 24, all about funnels. But LinkedIn is going to look really expensive if you're just tracking to the cost per lead. And if you're not measuring past that, if you're not measuring to cost per sales qualified lead, or cost per proposal, or cost per closed deal. Those are the points in your sales process where LinkedIn is gonna start looking really good. So if you're not tracking all the way to that, you probably won't have enough faith in the platform to give it a real shot, or even keep going. We're also planning a Q and A episode here in the next few episodes. This is our first of hopefully many. And I want to get our q&a questions from you. So any question you have about LinkedIn, I mean, we'll make it a total potpourri. Email them over to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com and we'll do our best to include it. I want to highlight a couple new reviews on our iTunes page Naira Perez, who is the founder of SpringHill Digital up in Portland. She is a LinkedIn Ads and a social ads expert. I've gotten to talk to you on many occasions. She's amazing. Okay, so her review says two words "amazing and useful". "AJ gives you actionable lessons. He doesn't keep secrets when it comes to optimizing ads on LinkedIn. He shares what has worked for him and what hasn't. If you run LinkedIn ads, listen to AJ, you will learn something in every episode, he is the gift that keeps on giving". Naira, thank you so much for the kind words, I'm so glad that you're getting a lot of use out of this. The next one comes from Mark Gustafson, who's the founder of 900Kings, and actually a close friend. He's actually the inspiration and my fact checker for episodes eight and nine, all about Facebook ads and Google ads. He's a fantastic paid search and social marketer. So Mark says "best B2B Advertising resource". "AJ is the best in the business. There isn't anyone else I turned to with B2B questions. He's easily the most knowledgeable about the LinkedIn ads platform. The podcast is pure value and perfect for the newest B2B marketer all the way to the most senior. Also, can we talk about that dreamy voice? I could listen to those dulcet tones for days." Mark, thanks for the kind words and thanks for turning a bright red behind the mic. I'm so glad this isn't a video podcast. And seriously, listen to my voice. There is nothing sweet about this. I'll rant for a second. I've got this crazy accent from growing up in both Utah and Arizona and learning Spanish in high school learning Russian after high school and before college. Basically, I don't even know how to describe my own accent. I sound real weird and I fully admit it. Okay, cool. Now I want to feature you so please do make sure you review on whatever podcast player you listen to this on. Leave a review. I'd love to shout you out on air. Thanks in advance for that. Okay, with that being said, let's hit it. 5:59 Agile Testing We're gonna talk about agile testing. So what is agile? Well, agile methodology is really started out in project management as a way for cross functional teams to get to move quickly and build collaboratively through continuous improvement. Now, you may have heard of development teams working in two weeks sprints, or doing daily stand up meetings. This all comes from the whole agile movement. We've adapted this to LinkedIn Ads management because it's a process that really requires continuous improvement, just like project management. So what is agile management of LinkedIn Ads? Well, to me, it's it's really making quick decisions on results from your LinkedIn Ads, so that you can learn more and test faster, find out what performs and then you can do more of that and have success for longer. So I'm going to share the agile process that we follow. And it all starts the moment we launch new ads. So when we launch new ads, we try to launch on either a Monday or a Tuesday whenever possible. And that's because those two days are the days where LinkedIn traffic is the strongest. We try to stay in the morning because morning tends to be the strongest traffic times for LinkedIn. We're always going to launch two ads, an AB test, where we are varying something so that we have something to compare against. Because if you just launch one ad, whether it performs well or whether it performs poorly, you don't know what caused that. But if you launch two at a time, you're giving yourself a better chance of having something that's going to be successful and getting to compare against what wasn't successful. Now if our Monday or a Tuesday happens to land on a holiday or the next few days our holiday we try to postpone either launched the week earlier or a week later. Again, when possible. Sometimes you've got a gun to your head and you just have to get ads launched. I'm sure you've listened to episode six because it was one of our most popular episodes. It's all about bidding and budgeting and it's the strategy we use to get the lowest cost from LinkedIn, no matter what your budget and what your performance. So if you've listened to that, you know that you're going to start with cost per click bidding. And you're going to bid really low to keep your risk low as you're testing. Right after your ads go live for the first day or day and a half, LinkedIn is testing your ads to try to figure out what the relevancy score is going to be. In order for them to test, they seem to give you pretty prime placement for your ads. And they're going to show quite a few impressions to your audience. And really, they're going to give you the benefit of the doubt in most situations. Regardless of how your bidding, chances are, they'll probably show you towards the top of the rankings. So you're probably getting impressions that are worth more than what you're paying, especially if you're bidding low. But once a day to a day and a half has passed. LinkedIn has shown your ad enough times they've given it enough impressions or given them enough impressions, that they can give you this relevancy score. And let's say it's a number between 0 and 10. Based off of that relevancy score, your next few days are going to become very evident how you're performing. So days two and three, we're watching to see what happens. LinkedIn has given you the relevancy score that they think you deserve. I think they make the decision a little bit quick, but so do all the other platforms. But you're really on your own now. And it could result in three possible outcomes here. So the first outcome is, you have a really high click through rate right out of the gate. And so LinkedIn gives you a great relevancy score, you immediately start spending everything you want to. And if you click performance chart inside of campaign manager, and look at these campaigns, by impressions, it will look like a couple of flat days where LinkedIn was giving you the benefit of the doubt. And then a spike upward when you actually outperformed their expectations. That's fantastic. On the opposite side of the spectrum, you could also come out of the gate with a low click through rate and a poor relevancy score. You'll know this happened when your impressions really fall off a cliff. So if you go to again, performance chart inside of campaign manager, and you look by the impressions by day, your first day, LinkedIn gave you a bunch of impressions. The second day, it was kind of halfway through where they decided you were a poor performer. And then by the third day, they just didn't deliver much. It looks like the downslope of a mountain. And the third potential outcome is really you did okay, you got an okay click through rate and a decent relevancy score. And things might continue the way that LinkedIn kind of predicted they were. So now we'll dive into what you can do, based off of which outcome you really landed in. 10:40 Outcome Number 1 So outcome number one, you did great, your ads are attractive enough to get traffic, but don't rest on your laurels yet it's not over. Once you get people to click, now you need to convert them. So assuming things are looking good to the click through rate, people actually care about your ads. Now you're going to go into data gaps. mode, let your ads run for the next $300 to $1,000 and get a feel for the conversion rate. If you're happy with your conversion rate and your cost per lead, just let it ride. Go back into data gathering mode, you're gonna hands off, leave it alone. So you can accumulate enough data to analyze, and use to optimize later. Go listen to Episode 15, if you haven't already, because it's all about benchmarks. And we go super deep into how you can tell what's working and what's not. So you can focus in the right area. And you want to make sure that you're watching this performance over time, because we have this thing happen in social advertising, especially called ad saturation, or audience fatigue. And what that is, is you are showing your same ads and offers to the same people over and over and on a pretty good performing ad, still only about 1% of people who see it will end up clicking on it. So that means 99% of people potentially see your ad and go, nah, I don't want to click on it. Even the people who might want to click on it, if it's the fourth, fifth, eighth time they've seen this exact ad, they're going to take a mental note of it, and then just skip it next time they become banner blind. And the way this will manifest itself in your account, if you go back into performance chart in campaign manager, and switch to looking by average click through rate, you can see over time that your click through rate is starting to drop. We found this period to be about 27 to 33 days on average, which is about a month. So what that tells us is if things are going pretty well, we might check on it two weeks from now three weeks from now and just see our our click through rates decreasing significantly. Does it feel like these ads have lost steam? Have they dropped in relevancy score leading to higher cost per click or lower delivery? And we know because the average is about a month. That means once a month, we're going to plan on refreshing our ad creative or testing a new offer, even even if it was a fantastically powerful high performing offer to begin with, because over time, anything will become a low performer, if you've saturated your audience hard enough, and that's mostly ad saturation, people getting sick of seeing the same ads. And you can relieve them of this by simply just changing the image. You may also want to change your ad copy in case they've already clicked or maybe even converted. But what's most important here is the ad needs to look different and stand out. 13:35 Audience Fatigue Now audience fatigue is something that's a little bit different. Let's say you've been advertising heavily for the last four or five years. Or maybe we'll simplify it, let's say for the last one year, you've been going heavy on an audience. You've been religiously changing your ad copy, keeping things fresh, trying new offers entirely, you may find that your performance decreases over time because the that audience has already heard of your company and is now starting to ignore anything from your company. This isn't a great place to be in because if you've been advertising heavily for years and years, chances are you are really relying on the leads that this platform pushes. But it could be a sign that you either need to really vary things up, or even try going on pause for a little bit, giving your audience a rest, and then see if they come back after a little while. So that's how I handle it. If you launch and the launch was very successful, your ads did great. 14:30 Outcome Number 2 But what if you had a failed launch? This is outcome number two, it means your ads really didn't land with your audience. There could be a lot of reasons for that. You might have done a poor job of actually defining who that audience was. Your ad might not have looked attractive enough for them to stop scrolling. And maybe most often, your ad copy didn't do a good job of pressing on a pain point, or calling out to them in a way that they cared about. But for whatever reason, your ads came out of the gate with a poor, click through rate and you've got a bad relevancy score. LinkedIn gave you a small sample of impressions for a day to a day and a half. And it means your ads didn't get enough clicks to qualify for a high relevancy score. So performance is likely going to be terrible. You can force it, you can specifically go in and bid higher or do automated bidding. But if you do this, you will pay way too much per click, and you will just be getting robbed by the platform. When ads come out of the gate performing poorly, sometimes it's really unfair. Sometimes LinkedIn unfairly awarded you a poor relevancy score because in the sample, they showed they didn't see enough clicks. And so they assumed you had a poor relevancy score. But you can resurrect this by just launching the same ads again. So if we launch on a Friday or a Saturday, and our ads just die, most of the time, what we'll try doing is just go and relaunch exactly the same ads on a Monday or a Tuesday, and just see. We're giving LinkedIn just one more chance with these ads to see if they unfairly awarded a poor relevancy score. If they fail for a second time, though, especially on a Monday or a Tuesday morning launch, then we know something's wrong with that ad creative. And we need to go back to the drawing board, or continue to suffer the most expensive cost per click you've ever seen from any channel. If you're having a hard time getting people to click on your ads or getting LinkedIn to even serve them. This point, you probably have not gotten enough traffic to find out how it's going to convert on your offer. Or maybe you did get a decent conversion rate. But since the clicks are costing so much, your cost per lead wouldn't be worthwhile in the end anyway. So at this point, things are going poorly and you should plan on just pausing these ads and relaunching an entirely new test. Episode 24 was all about funnels, so make sure you're paying attention to the right thing. If your click through rates are doing great, don't go and test new ads copy. And if your conversion rates are great, don't go and make major landing page changes. First start with the lowest hanging fruit, the parts of the account that are having the most trouble. If what you're trying isn't working, you can really try something radically different. And like I mentioned earlier, an AB test is going to give you a better chance of finding success with at least one of your variations. So try launching two ads where you vary the pain point you're pressing on. Or maybe you're touching on a different motivation. Or maybe you're even testing different calls to action or offers. You never know how something is going to perform until you test it. So don't be afraid to launch new ads and quickly retire them or pause them. If they're not living up to your standards. Then we have the third outcome, which is kind of like it's okay performance. There are certainly things you can do to try to increase performance. But if things are just going okay, I would say just like option number one where we had a success campaign go into data gathering mode. And then once you have enough data, evaluate to see if it's worth continuing or if there's something in the account that needs to be improved. Here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into maintaining an account once it's doing well. 18:15 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads Experts. 18:25 If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you, B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We manage LinkedIn's's largest accounts and we are the only media buying agency to be official LinkedIn partners. And performance to your goals is our only priority. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to get in touch, and we'd love to help you absolutely demolish your goals. 18:47 Continued Maintenance Alright, let's jump into continued maintenance. We talked about Ad saturation, how about once a month, your ads aren't going to be fresh anymore and you've got to change them up. So plan on doing that at least once per month. And follow the same agile testing steps that I mentioned before. Every new ad launch, you're going to take a look at it and say, okay, for the first three days, I'm going to watch and see, do these perform well? Are they getting a good click through rate? Are we getting a good cost per click? And then over the next week or two, you're saying, okay, is this leading to the conversions at the right costs that I want. You'll also want to keep your offers or your calls to action fresh, because you can change the image you can change the ad copy of your ads, a ton of times, but eventually people are going to catch on if you've been advertising exactly the same offer for the last six months. Every offer really has its own life. We've seen some that after a month that audience has just done and then we had one account where we had a winning offer that we couldn't dethrone for like seven months. No matter what other offers we threw at this audience, they kept preferring the one from seven months ago, and it was still converting even though it wasn't converting at the same rate that it was at the beginning, so we were trying to get it off its throne. So if you've been running an offer for about a month, chances are you can refresh your ad creative, use a new visual, and you can get that offer to live for another month, maybe even two. So watch that performance. Specifically watch your cost per lead, and your conversion rate as you go. As soon as you see that conversion rates start to slip, that's probably a great sign that you need to change up your call to action, give them a different kind of offer something that's new, that they will actually consider if they've already seen the other one several times and have decided, oh, I've already converted, or no, I'm not interested in that. And then keep that up, rotate through new ad creative and new offers as needed as your performance starts to decrease. And if you do this, congratulations, your lead generation machine is complete. To maintain it, what you need to do is Just keep feeding it new ads, new headlines, new intros, and new offers only when they're needed. And then this entire time you're gaining knowledge, you're learning about your audience along the way, you're finding out what they like and what they don't. 21:14 Pain Points Here at B2Linked, we do a lot of ads troubleshooting. And so I thought it would be helpful to at least share with you how we think about finding pain points and what potential solutions are. So let's say your ads aren't performing well. That means either you're getting a high cost per click, or a low click through rate, or even both, they oftentimes go together. What you can do is try new ad copy, new imagery. If it's a video ad, try new video creative. And after two or three different tests of messaging, or visuals, if it's still not getting clicked, chances are the problem is your offer. You're probably asking people to do something that they are either unwilling to do and it scares them away, or they just don't see value in what about your conversion rates. Let's say you're not happy with how much you're paying per conversion, or your conversion rate is low. There are two things that we like to test here. And the first is evaluate your landing page. It's possible that your offer itself is really attractive, but maybe the way that your landing page is laid out, or the elements on it are getting in the way or distracting, and it's decreasing your conversion rate. One easy way to test if it's your landing page that's getting in the way, or the offer is you can test the same exact ad, but run it as a LinkedIn lead gen form. So you're asking people with the same form, but you're skipping the landing page, your website visit all together. Now lead gen forms, as I'm sure you know, tend to convert significantly higher. So we expect that when we do this test, the lead gen form is probably going to convert let's say 10 to 50% higher. But if it is significantly more than that, let's say conversion rate doubles or triples, that's my first clue that something on the landing page was getting in the way and you need to do some testing there. If it's not the landing page, though, it's likely the offer itself. Listen to Episode 10, where we go really deep into offers. And that'll give you some great ideas on how to try out new offers ideate, formulate, and create new offers. What if your ads and conversions are all going really well, but sales reports back that they're not closing these deals? Well, there's a lot of different things that are possibly out of your control here as a marketer, but maybe your sales team isn't nurturing right? Or, and this is a hard realization. You might not have the right product market fit, maybe your product or service that you're selling, maybe it doesn't solve a significant pain point enough that people want to buy. And no amount of snazzy marketing can fix that. Those are obviously much deeper problems, but see if you can isolate where they are and take off your marketer hat and put on your sales enablement hat and go and try to solve that problem, and that will earn you some significant quarterly bonuses. 24:06 Goal of agile management The goal of agile management of LinkedIn is really threefold. Number one, you want confidence that what you're doing is working and will lead to business. And this is hard, because in B2B, we oftentimes have these long sales cycles. And it doesn't make sense to keep advertising for a year and a half if you don't know for sure that there's going to be some revenue that comes from that. You'll want to have stopped advertising much earlier. So as a marketer, you're looking for shorter term clues that the traffic will convert into profitable sales. Goal number two is you want to keep fresh with your audience so that they don't get sick of your ads, your offers, or even your company. If you can stay fresh, your performance won't decline significantly. And this is fantastic because social ads of any kind really are a moving target because the same thing that worked two months ago may totally fail today. And that's just because of ad saturation. So do your part to keep things looking fresh so that you never get stale to that audience. And then Goal number three here, you want to identify the problems and inefficiencies of your account so that you can fix them early and they don't turn into something terrible later on. Okay, I've got the episode resources for you coming up, so stick around. 25:28 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 25:39 References I referenced quite a few other episodes in here. So check those out in the show notes if you haven't listened to them already. Episode 25 is all about optimization of your account, making it better when it's already doing well. Episode Six is on bidding and budgeting. Episode 10 is all about offers. And Episode 15 is all about benchmarking. To see where you stand if you're performing well, or if you're performing poorly. If you're new to LinkedIn ads, or if you have a colleague you're trying to train, check out the course, I actually did the LinkedIn Ads course on LinkedIn Learning. There's a link for that down below. But because it's LinkedIn Learning, it is insanely inexpensive, and it's a great training. It's the same thing that I charge $500 an hour for and would take me an hour and a half to train you and your team. And through LinkedIn, you can get it for 25 bucks. Or if you have a LinkedIn premium subscription, it's free. Take a look at your podcast player right now, especially if you're new, if this is your first episode. If so, congratulations. Welcome! And hit that subscribe button. We want to make sure you stick around and hear more awesome LinkedIn Ads strategies. Please do rate and review us on whatever podcast player you lean on. We're especially looking for stitcher right now. So if you happen to be a stitcher user, I would love it if you go and review us there because we only have one lonely one there. And of course, I'll shout you out for your review. As long as I know that it's you. So give me something good to say about you there. And like I mentioned at the beginning of the show, get your QA questions in, email us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And actually, feel free to email us with ideas or topics you'd like to see us cover or questions, anything that you'd like. But especially I'm looking for good Q&A questions to cover or a whole Q&A episode. Hopefully, it's the first of many. So I'll see you back here next week, cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources: LinkedIn Explaining Auction How Does the LinkedIn Auction Work? LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Show Transcript: LinkedIn Ads are unapologetically expensive, but what makes them that way? Let's break it down. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. 0:19 Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. I'm so tired of hearing people say the same thing about LinkedIn Ads that they've said forever. I've heard it's really expensive. Why is that? I'm gonna dive into exactly why that is and what you can do about it. Let's hit it. 0:34 So how does LinkedIn decide how much you pay for a click? Well, there are two big pieces that weigh in here. The first is what your bid is. Now you can bid by either cost per click, cost per thousand impressions, or automated bid, which really is just a cost per thousand impression bid that you don't have to babysit as much. So we're going to concentrate mostly on cost per click here because I'm assuming most of you listening are bidding are really smart advertisers and are bidding on a max cost per click model. The next piece that factors in here is your relevancy score. Now, LinkedIn calls this relevancy score, Google calls it quality score, Facebook calls it relevance score. And it's all the same concept. It's essentially, how often do I make the network money when they show my ads. So each individual ad creative gets a relevancy score. And it has to come up with this. So let's say you launch a brand new ad. Well, LinkedIn doesn't know what relevancy score to give it. And so it's probably going to borrow from other ads in the campaign. If all the other ads have been performing really well, then it's probably going to get an assumption of a really high relevancy score. If the others are performing really poorly, it will probably assume this one will perform poorly too. So other ads in the same campaign. But let's say this is a brand new campaign. LinkedIn doesn't know how it's going to work, then I think they might either borrow from other campaigns that are running concurrently, or borrow from the account in the whole. So your relevancy score is mostly made up of what your click through rate is. And this makes a lot of sense, because if I have a 1% click through rate on my ads, and my competitor has a half of a percent for every single time that LinkedIn shows my ad, or my competitors ad, there is an opportunity cost in it for them in saying, hey, even if AJ is, you know, he has a 1% click through rate, he's only willing to bid $5 per click, his competitor has half that, and the competitors willing to bid $8, well, LinkedIn looks at it and goes well, for every hundred times. I show AJ's ad, I'm gonna make $5 and every time I show as competitors ad for 100 times, I'm going to make $4 so even though I'm bidding less, LinkedIn still says that I'm making them more money than my competitor. So this is how this relevancy score works. It was really pioneered by Google back in the early Google AdWords. Now Google Ads days. And it makes a lot of sense. So it's based off of how often you make LinkedIn money. Well, that is pretty much your click through rate, it's for every time I show the ad, how likely is someone to click it, and therefore LinkedIn get paid, but they're also paying attention to things like comments, likes, shares, and even negative member feedback that they can provide on ads. So you can actually find what your relevancy score is by running a Campaign Performance Report. And then look at it's at the time of recording column BI is called campaign quality score. And so this is a snapshot at any given time, you can see what your campaign quality score is. But I would argue this isn't all that helpful, because this is something that changes quite regularly. And you can't always wait around to watch if this number has changed up or down. I think you just need to go by maybe what you're ad performance is looking like today. And if performance looks bad today, and over the last four days, you can assume it probably has a poor relevancy score, and you can try something else. 4:10 Auction So the auction, LinkedIn calls it a second price auction. And the way it works mathematically is we're going to put you versus a competitor. So you have a bid. And we're going to multiply the bid by the relevant score to get a combined score. And we'll talk about what that means here in a minute. Okay, so you're bidding $8 and you have a relevancy score of 6, because you've got a click through rate that's slightly above benchmark because you created a good ad. So you take your $8 bid times your 6 relevancy score, and that gives you 48. So that's your combined score. And at this point, that doesn't mean anything. Now your competitor comes along and bids $12. So they're bidding $4 more per click than you and I know you're sweating right now you're thinking for sure I'm going to lose this bid. But they have a relevancy score of 3, because their click through rates are well below the average. And they're just pulling teeth to try to get LinkedIn to give them traffic. So a competitor bid of 12 times the relevancy score of 3, they're getting a combined score of 36. Now, this is where the math gets a little bit tricky, but you have a combined score of 48. your competitor has a combined score of 36. So what the auction does is it divides the losers combined score that's 36, in this case, divided by your the winners relevancy score, which is a 6, and that equals $6. So that means that that really is how high that the winner would have to have bid, you know, you bid $8, but you actually only needed to bid $6 to beat the loser. And because it's a second price auction, what you need to do is pay one more cent than that. So in this case, you bid $8, but you're only going to pay $6 plus the one cent to beat them by a cent. So that is how a second price auction works. Again, this was really pioneered by Google. This is how digital advertising has been forever. So does this actually happen in practice? Well, not from my experience. And I'm not saying that LinkedIn is disingenuous here in what type of auction they have. But go and do this experiment for me, go for half a day, bid $50 on a cost per click basis. And tell me if you only paid the $12 and one cent that it would take to beat second place. Chances are, you probably didn't. You bid $50 aand you probably paid something like $48.30 for it. So I'm not sure if it's because it's not really a second price auction. Or maybe it's because there's enough competition around all the audiences they are always going to pay really close that there's always someone nipping at your heels with better performance or bidding higher. So the edge cases here, you may not want to download this report, you know, three times a day to see how your campaigns are doing and realizing that the campaign report will only give you the campaign relevancy score, not at the individual ad level. So it's helpful to understand what it looks like when you're really high or really low. So edge cases here, if you have a relevancy score of 10, you are getting tons of traffic, even if you bid all the way down to the floor. And because you're performing so well, with such a high click through rate, if the floor didn't exist, you should be able to pay less than the floor. But because there is a floor on everything, you can't do that. So a little hint here, when we get into the bidding budgeting episode, we'll talk about how you can use CPM bidding to pay even below the artificial floor. So that's a relevancy score of 10. Things are looking great. You can keep lowering your bid and still spend all of your money very efficiently. What if you get a relevancy score of 1? What that means is you were so uncompetitive in the auction that LinkedIn won't even show your ads. So you could bid you know $30, $40, $50 a click and it's not even until you're paying super huge when you start to overcome the relevancy scores of your competition. So you're most likely going to land between there. 8:12 The floor So I mentioned that LinkedIn has a floor. And the concept of the bidding floor was really started to keep the riffraff out. I think at this time, LinkedIn probably saw other ad networks that were that they had a lot of crap on them, think like the belly fat ads on Facebook. And so what they did is they said, Hey, we know that competition is going to rise prices normally, but what we're going to do is set a arbitrary floor here that you're not going to be willing to pay if you're just being opportunistic, trying to get cheap traffic. And so they make sure only advertisers are coming to the platform that are serious. And then once you hit the floor, then competition kind of rises normally. And Google did this really well by you know, initially in the early days of AdWords, they set a five cent floor on every single keyword out there. And so at the early days, you could bid five cents and still get traffic. And Facebook followed suit. I don't know what Facebook's minimum was because they've always gone CPM, but it was really low. And then they let everyone come and have success on their platform, and then go and tell their friends who then jumped on and used it. And competition kind of raised naturally for everyone. And I call these really generous platforms. Because, you know, early on early days before there was competition, you really couldn't do any wrong. You'd come to the network and inevitably have success unless you were a crappy marketer. Okay, so the way this goes history was back in 2008, LinkedIn released a $2 floor for all text ads. And that was, you know, basically from 2008 till they launched in 2013, the sponsored content ads, and I was the first person to launch sponsored content ads, which was awesome. I got to use them before there was a significant floor. So back then when sponsored content came out, there was somewhere around a $4.50 cent floor. I saw it down to $4.25 for some really uncompetitive audiences. I saw it, you know, $6.75ish for more competitive audiences. And it stayed that way for quite a while. And then just recently, last year in 2019, when LinkedIn released their objective based advertising platform, prices increased about 35%. So what used to be a $4.50 floor is now $6.08. The way this works is back before objective based advertising, we had a website visits objective, and that was how you would just get traffic to your website. And that is currently called legacy. But back then it was just called website visits. After objective based advertising, they moved to where now website visits has a 35% increase in the floor, so you're going to have to bid higher and it Raise the auction for everyone. So a little trick here, if you're still sending website visits traffic, and let's say, back in 2018, you had launched some of these campaigns, try just editing the campaign to repurpose it so that you can keep it as a legacy campaign. That will be something really cool to help you get, you know, 35% less cost per click at least anywhere near the floor, as your competition is getting. So you might ask, well, if you're not bidding right at the floor, what's the harm in LinkedIn raising the floor price? The challenge here is that when suggested bids and the floor price go up, people begin by bidding higher, either because they're forced to now or because it's suggested and they just don't know better, so they're going to take the platform's recommendation. And now when everyone is bidding slightly higher, competition gets higher, and those who aren't bidding as high start to lose traffic or maybe if their relevancy score isn't doing as well. So now prices have been raised for everyone and It feels quite artificial. And I'm sure it's very obvious to you, I'm not a fan of artificial price hikes, I'm not a fan of even a floor price, I honestly believe that you should have a platform that is really inexpensive to get in, and then you let competition naturally raise the prices up. But since we do have a floor, it's helpful to understand what else may contribute to LinkedIn's higher prices. 12:24 Low inventory from low use So aside from the artificial floors, which I obviously don't support, one of the things is low inventory from just general low use of the platform. So absolutely nothing against LinkedIn here. I love it as a platform, both paid and organic. But it is also the network that you don't think to spend as much time on because it's professional. So meanwhile, people are going and visiting Facebook 18 times a day, on average they're probably going to LinkedIn three or four times a month. Now there are certainly more active users. But with the vast majority of users checking in, not very often, and especially early on with LinkedIn, it was a platform that people only came back to every like six months to update their resume, or when they were looking for a job. This ended up creating really low inventory. 13:09 Low variety of types of professionals So the few advertisers who were bidding on that inventory, it cost more for them. Now, it's really exciting that LinkedIn is getting used more and more. So we're seeing a lot more inventory open up, probably keeping prices relatively steady, even though a lot of new advertisers are coming in. Something else that tends to lead to these high prices, is the fact that there's a low variety of the types of professionals and businesses that there are out there. So follow me on this. If you are bidding on keywords like with Google, your competition is built naturally over billions or even trillions of combinations of words in the written language. And that's pretty cool. That means you can keep prices pretty low for a long period of time. Facebook is more audience focused, but they built over consumer based information. And other facets. So you can split any individual person up into lots of different segments, you know, are they a cat person? Do they love coffee? Are they into music? And so you have all of these different ways of categorizing a human. And it means that you can spread that competition out really naturally. On the other hand, LinkedIn has a very few set of facets that you should be able to target someone by. There are only so many job titles out there. There's only so many levels of seniority, there are only so many finite numbers of companies of certain sizes. And so because of that competition is going to naturally group around the more competitive aspects of who someone is. Certainly if you are targeting the highest rank, so like a CEO of large enterprise companies, that's going to be a really expensive click. 14:52 High competition from big brands You also have high competition from really big brands because they have these deals that are worth millions of dollars to them. The same reason why if you want to try to outbid Salesforce in Google ads, you're going to be spending $80, $90 per click on something like sales CRMs. Really expensive because you have a company like Salesforce, who are such finely tuned marketers, and they have a large lifetime value. They know what they can afford to spend. And so they're willing to spend big and bid high. And so you've got this high competition from brands who the click is probably worth much more to them than it is to you. And so it drives competition up higher for everyone. 15:33 Competition will naturally increase over time The fourth cause here to higher prices, his competition is naturally going to rise over time. More and more people hear about and consider the platform and then they start having conversations with their bosses about what channel should we get involved in. And inevitably, they're going to think, hey, we should check out LinkedIn, I've heard some good things. And also advertisers are getting more sophisticated at tracking. And as they do this, they're going to find more and more valuable In this really highly targeted, really high quality traffic, and they're going to make the decision to scale and keep spending and maybe even keep bidding higher as they start to get into Salesforce land. 16:11 Timing of day The fifth cause of high prices here is actually the time of day. And you wouldn't think about this usually. But there are certain times of the day when people tend to be on LinkedIn. And there are certain times when they tend not to be. And what happens is, you know, advertisers will go in with a budget with certain bids. Sometimes during the day, they will outspend their budget, and they will drop out of the auction. So you can imagine some advertiser demand may taper off towards the end of the day. So that may affect things. When people are online more, it creates more added inventory, bringing overall prices down. And when people aren't there, let's say in the middle of the night, and everyone's bidding for that just few insomniac visitors who might come, those cost per click are going to be really high and it's probably not a great time to be bidding where people their not really in their right mind. There's also this issue of time of year where, you know, in December, people are really blowing their budgets up because they're trying to finish the year, the quarter, the month really strong. And so you have these big advertisers who are just you know, draining huge budgets. And in January all that kind of disappears. January's traditionally a very good month for LinkedIn advertisers. No one's in a hurry. It's the beginning of the year where people are back in the office and don't have things on their calendars. They're willing to entertain. They now have higher budgets, or they have new fresh budgets that they can start to think about allocating. So timing of day timing and general seasonality plays in here nicely. 17:40 Bidding each other up Okay, number six cause for high prices is of course bidding each other up. So one competitor says, hey, I'm getting less traffic than I'd like. I'm gonna go ahead and raise my bids by you know 5% or 10%. And you'll at some point, go Ah, you know what, I'm not getting traffic anymore. I better go on raise my bids. And so you tend to bid each other up over time. 18:03 Bidding yourself up Seventh cause of high prices is bidding yourself up. So when you have a single account and two campaigns who are targeting the same user, you are not going to bid yourself up, you're not providing yourself competition, which is really helpful to know. But there are companies out there who have multiple accounts, let's say using an example like Microsoft, it doesn't make sense for the Xbox team and the Microsoft Office team to be using the same account. So they might theoretically be targeting the same user, even though it's both coming from Microsoft. And in that case, they would bid each other up, you know, Xbox says I'm willing to bid $6. And Microsoft Office says I'm willing to bid $6.50 and you can see competition is, you know, the same company is now driving their own costs up. 18:52 Platform generosity I mentioned this concept of platform generosity a little earlier. And I want to throw this out there as a concept I've been thinking about over time, and the way I qualify it is, it's the feeling that the network really supports you. And it inspires confidence to test new things, knowing that it's not going to embarrass you or cause you to make expensive mistakes. So Google and Facebook definitely have a platform generosity. I've tested this with Facebook, where I go in and just say, okay, I'm going to take Facebook's recommendations in creating a new ad set. And I'm going to bid what they say to bid. And I'm going to target how they say to target. And generally I'm going to have pretty good performance unless my ads suck. Google's kind of the same way. It's certainly getting much tougher now that everyone on the planet is advertising on Google. So quite a bit more competition there. I don't feel like LinkedIn has a high amount of platform generosity, because if you go down and create a brand new campaign, you're going to tick the audience expansion box which generally muddies your targeting and decreases your lead quality. You're going to bid automated bid and that's going to oftentimes You know, depending on your click through rate, but if you have an average click through rate, you're going to pay much more for that click, then you would have if you bid CPC. So that's one. The other one is if you do decide to pay by cost per click, which tends to be the lowest cost most of the time, LinkedIn will recommend a really insanely high bid to you, regardless of what your budget is. And they'll have a floor that's quite high in a suggested bid range that's quite high. So I would absolutely love to see LinkedIn start focusing on platform generosity. And in talking to LinkedIn's product people, this is certainly not what they intend. They don't intend it to come across like we're, you know, less focused on the user having success and more on padding the bottom line, but I think an extra focus here and attitude shift could go a long way in helping people understand that if I test something on LinkedIn, I'm not going to be embarrassed to my boss because I overspent the budget or just paid way too much. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into what you can do to pay less on LinkedIn. 21:11 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 21:22 Alright, let's jump into this. So now you know the history. And if you're paying too much for LinkedIn Ads traffic, here's what you can actually go and do about it. So a few different scenarios here. Let's say you're not being competitive enough. If you're running text ads falling from the first position to the second ad position, it's just a few pixels below. So there's really not a huge problem to bidding low with text ads, you'll fall down to the next position down and still be above the fold. Sponsored content is a little bit different of an animal here though, because the first ad position starts as the second item in their newsfeed. And if you drop down to the second position, that's five more slots down. So now you'll be at slot six for your ad position. And if you're up at the very top, you're probably going to have a much higher click through rate than you would if you fell down one or two positions. We've actually done a test here where we found that if we had a 1.2% click through rate in the first position, it actually dropped down to a 0.2%. So it dropped an entire full percent, just going from slot one down to slot two. It's important to understand here that your lead quality does not decrease when you drop down positions or when you bid less. The common thought is that it does, but in a lot of testing we've done we have not found lead quality, as long as we set our targeting really tight, we have not found lead quality to fail us when we're bidding low. If you are bidding by cost per click, LinkedIn is much more incentivized to show you in higher positions because that's where the ads get clicked. If you are bidding by cost per impression, then you will tend to fall down positions much more quickly. So if you want to pay less, there were three real mechanisms you can do. The first is you can bid less. The second is you can launch ads that get a better click through rate. And the third is you can actually change your bidding strategy to bid smarter. So I'll put it out there this way. If you took LinkedIn's recommendations, and you bid really high, let's say you bid, you know $15 a click and you have a $50 per day budget. That means you're only going to get just over three clicks a day out of your budget. And you could probably hit that in the first half of the day. So imagine you spent all $50 in the first half of the day and then for the last half of the day, you just got nothing, your account was pretty much off. If you would have been half that you could have paid half the price and gotten double the amount of clicks and it might have actually gone all day, you know, maybe it still cuts off earlier in the day. So be smarter about the way you bid, pay attention to did I actually hit my budget during the mid day? I like to use this little rhyme, if you hit your budget during the day, you paid too much for clicks along the way. 24:19 Armchair Economist So now I get to sit in my in my armchair here and play the role of an armchair economist. Now I know LinkedIn has Stanford and Harvard MBAs who know way more about economics than I do. But I'm going to attempt to postulate here some ideas that I think LinkedIn could do to improve their pricing model. So first off, since the pricing has been set by artificial floors, I would love to see LinkedIn artificially cut its floor prices in half. And what would happen is, if we're already past the level of competition, where people are paying more than the floor, which we are in most cases I'm sure, LinkedIn has no need to worry about the riffraff. The floor will have already kept them out. And anyone who did attempt to come in and bid too low for what they're actually offering, they wouldn't be shown anyway. And of course, the better advertisers, they would be paying close attention to okay, how low do I bid before my traffic cuts off? What this would do is it would cause everyone on the network to come and have success and go tell their friends, just like early Google and Facebook. And I postulate that if the only thing that people knew about LinkedIn Ads, who hadn't tried it was no longer "I've heard it too expensive". We'd probably see LinkedIn ads gain mass adoption, and then pricing would come back up naturally. And I think it would be a lot better received. And I think what mass adoption on LinkedIn Ads would look like is everyone in B2B, LinkedIn would be the de facto platform that they would jump on and learn when they were very first coming out of college or be the first platform they try, rather than trying Google first, then Facebook and then kind of failing over to LinkedIn when Facebook got too expensive for them. And certainly, if this were the case, the Microsoft stock price would take a hit for a quarter or two. But then pricing would come back up naturally rather than artificially. And then everyone in business to business would recognize LinkedIn as a tier one platform and not a tier two or tier three. And this is not without precedent, because we've already seen that LinkedIn knows the effect of artificially lowering prices. When I very first tried sponsored Inmail back before it was in the platform, you had to go directly through a sales rep. It was a $3 per person you sent to and since it came out on the platform as self service, it turned out to be a I think they started the floor somewhere around 25 cents to send it and the floor now has been dropped twice. So they've artificially lowered the price of sponsored in mail twice, maybe even three times now,which is fantastic. We've seen much better performance from our sponsored in mail. And I'm so grateful that LinkedIn did that. And then even just recently, dynamic ads saw the same shift. And this one wasn't quite artificial. What happened is LinkedIn gave up that inventory that they had given to the programmatic exchanges for just general 300x250 banner ads across the site. And what that did is by dropping that inventory, it opened up the inventory to all of us advertisers to use both text ads, and dynamic ads that occupy that same space. So now dynamic ads dropped their prices more than half. It was actually down to about a third to a half of what they were before, which is fantastic. And now I can actually recommend using dynamic ads again, back then I couldn't because they cost more than than sponsored content, and they had really low engagement rates like text ads. So I would absolutely love to get rid of the high floors. I would love to see sponsored content. Sure text ads has always had a $2 floor. I'd love to see sponsored content adopt the $2 floor as well. And of course, if that doesn't get me any traffic, so be it, then I have to raise my floor. And of course the platform could inform you of that. Okay, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up, so stick around. 28:20 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 28:30 Resources Okay, I've got a couple of good resources for you. There's a really cool video back from 2013 where LinkedIn explains how their auction works. So if you weren't quite following with like the what do I divide by what and what got multiplied together to decide how much I pay? Go watch this video. It's there in your show notes. I've also linked to a YouTube video that I created where it discusses both bidding and budgeting strategies, and definitely check that one out. Next, I've got a course on LinkedIn learning com. It's called Advertising on LinkedIn. Definitely check that one out. The link is in the show notes here for you. And it's a really inexpensive way to learn from the ground up how to advertise in the most efficient way. As always, I would love it if whatever player you're on you do subscribe and then you make sure to rate and review as soon as you know how much value you're getting out of this. Make sure you leave a great review telling other people that they can find a lot of good stuff out of this podcast that I hope that you're getting. Finally, definitely email us Podcast@B2Linked.com with any ideas you have for future shows, we'd love to take your your recommendations here your advice, would love to cater to you. So anything you're looking to learn, I'd love to hear. I will see you back here next week. And I am cheering you on in your LinkedIn ads initiatives.

Show Resources: Ep 23 - LinkedIn Ads Reporting Insights You Didn't Know Were Available Ep 6 - LinkedIn Ads Bidding & Budgeting Strategies LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Show Transcript: Your LinkedIn Ads account is going great, but you want to raise. Here are the things you can do to bump performance, even if the account is already going great. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. So if things are going well in your account, but you're looking for some further wins. Well, I've got you covered. Today, we're going to be talking about the optimizations that you can do whether your account has a couple weeks of spend, or whether you've been a heavy spender for years. No matter where you're at, I'm sure you'll definitely get something out of this. In the news, as of the time of recording, LinkedIn is on there twice yearly shut down. This happens twice a year, and it's a whole week for the Fourth of July, and then a whole week at the last part of December. So not a whole lot happening over there. Not lots of new things coming out because they're all on vacation, but support tickets are still being responded to, so all's right in the world. On last week's episode, I told you about how several of us advertisers noticed that our click through rates dropped significantly on June 16, across a whole bunch of accounts. After a little deep diving and data, it looks like the drop was mostly noticed by those bidding cost per click, and not nearly as much by those bidding either cost per impression or automated. So we're gonna keep going, we're gonna keep digging and I'll definitely let you know what we find. But if anyone has insight as to what might have happened, I'd love to hear about it. Hit us up at Podcast@B2Linked.com. Just one review today from riverton12 it says "AJ is the best. Full disclosure I work for AJ at B2Linked. AJ is the best at what he does. I have learned more since I started working for him than I could have ever imagined. He explained stuff so plainly and just gets to the point. What a boss." I hesitated to read this one since it was from an employee, but I didn't ask my employees to leave reviews. So I thought I'd go ahead and shout it out. Steve, you know who you are. Thanks so much for the kind words and making me sound like a douche by reading that out loud. All right. I want to feature you. So definitely leave your review. Let me know anything about you that you especially want me to shout out on air. And let's keep these reviews cominng. All right, with that being said, let's hit it. Optimization2:22 So the topic of optimization when things are going well, but you want them to get better. And same kind of principle applies even if your accounts not going well, and you're just trying to improve it. But this is a lot simpler when you can see pockets of success that you can capitalize on, and pockets of failure that you can take care of bid down, turn off all those things. In advertising, I like to think that we have two hurdles that we always have to get over with our ads. I've used this analogy before, where the first hurdle that we have to get over is we have to get people to click on the ads. They have to be interesting enough that someone will want to engage Then once they've clicked, now we need them to convert and take the action that we're asking them to. And of course, many of you are in some heavy business to business applications here. So we can add some additional hurdles for things like getting them to mql status, like marketing qualified lead, or SQL, sales qualified lead. Maybe even all the way to close, where you've actually won the business. So think of these like funnel stages, because if you make it over one, but then totally trip and fall on the other, you're not going to win the race, or you may not even finish. So we'll talk about optimization techniques and things you should watch for on both of those hurdles, both getting people to click on your ads enough, and then getting those to convert. And I think it makes sense to focus on two different areas of performance, where we can eke some additional performance out of them. And so let's start here with taking the worst things in the account and making them better. Improve the worst. things so the average collectively for the whole comes way up and makes the whole thing look better. And of course, this really depends on what your definition of poor performance is. Because poor performance to me could be you're not getting enough volume, you're not spending your budget, or your cost per lead or cost per conversion, or cost per click is just too high, and it's dragging your performance down. So let's start with probably the most obvious, if something's not working, you can just shut it off. That means if you have a bad ad, or bad ads, or even whole bad campaigns, you can just go and hit pause on them and shut them off. Keep them from running. For audiences, you know, are not going to be profitable or ads that you know aren't, this is a great way to just get the performance gone. If you are after cost efficiency, though. Let's say this a campaign is going okay. But cost per conversion is just a little bit too high and it needs to get cheaper. One of my favorite strategies here is to just bid down. If you know that your ads are 15%, more expensive than they should be, then you can go and bid down by 15%. And you will lose some volume there, it won't get nearly as many clicks. But the clicks and traffic you do get will be efficient. Let's say that you listen to my advice in Episode 6 about bidding and budgeting, and you have something that's performing not very well and so you've bid it all the way to the floor, the very lowest price you can bid. But let's say you're still spending too much or it's still inefficient. Of course, you could shut it off. But you could also limit the budget, lower the budget down, because if all of your best performers are spending, you know, $50 a day, let's say, and you take some of the worst and lower them down to where they're spending maybe $10 per day. Sure, they may still be a little bit inefficient, but on average, the whole account is going to look better because you've minimized the bad performance.If you listen to Episode 23, where Sam Fonoimoana offered you guys his free targeting audit, which is amazing. If you haven't gotten it, go get it. And you can use this for a lever that we call tightening our targeting. If you know something's not performing very well, you could take a look at the audience and see if there's any pieces of that, that you could trim out or cut off entirely, leaving you with a little bit less volume, but all the good stuff. This could be things like narrowing your company sizes to only those who can really afford you who are going to be top quality leads. Or maybe you're including too many seniorities. Maybe the person who actually feels your pain is a senior seniority, meaning that they're an individual contributor. And if you're targeting, let's say managers and directors, you're probably paying too much for that traffic. And then what about your ads? Let's say your ads performance is not great. There are some pretty simple things you can do to those. Again, on episode six, we talked about About the bidding and budgeting, and how your click through rate affects how much you're paying. But if you're paying too much or not getting enough traffic, one of the best things you can do is test new ad copy. If you have click through rates on sponsored content that are like, let's say, 0.4%, you're about average, you're probably going to be paying $8 to $11 per click if you're targeting somewhere in North America. So if you can launch some ads that increase, let's say, you get up to 0.7 or 0.8%, click through rates, you'll likely see your costs per click drop to around the $6 to $8 range, and immediately you're 20%, 30% more profitable just because you've got more people interested in clicking on your ads. We found the best performance in testing to come from adjusting our intro text in ads so that's usually the first AB test we're going to run. But if you've noticed that your click through rates are coming down over time, you're probably saturating that audience and it's probably a good idea to give them something fresh. After all, if they've already looked at your ad five times and just said, yeah, I'm not going to click on that, then no matter what you do to the words, they're still going to remember the creative the imagery. So try changing out your imagery, give it a fresh look and see if you can help improve your click through rates that wa. That will bring cost down and it will bring volume up, and that will cover a multitude of ills. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into how you can improve your best performers. 8:31 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. 8:40 If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We manage LinkedIn's largest accounts. We're the only media buying agency to become official LinkedIn partners, and performance to your goals is our only priority. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to get in touch. And we'd love to help you absolutely demolish your goals. Improving Your Best Performers9:05 All right, let's jump into the levers that you have to improve on the stuff that's already working in your account. The same rule for good performers applies here, where good performance could mean all kinds of things to you so you'll have to pick and choose from here what makes the most sense. But good performance could mean that you're getting a really low cost per conversion. Or maybe you're hitting the right volume of leads or fully spending your budget. There are all kinds of things that you as advertisers will want to focus on, and you may be gold on, you may get bonused by so that's what we're gonna try to do. Find those particular levers and help them out. The first thing I like to do with great performers is bid them up. Because if you have a campaign that's performing, let's say 30% better than average to the cost per lead, if you go and increase your bids by 20%, you'll now likely get a lot more volume, alot more clicks, and a lot more conversions, and you'll still be 10% more efficient than average. I call that a win. Now, of course, if you ever increase your bids, you'll also want to increase your budgets, because like we've talked about, if you hit your daily budget during the day, you paid too much for your clicks along the way. So make sure you raise your budgets high enough that your campaigns aren't just hitting them in the middle of the day. You want that to stretch all the way to the end, ideally. Same thing here on improving your ad copy to improve on the already winning ads. So you've got ads that are doing great. Well, there's probably a test that you can run that will get you 5%, incremental 10% or even 15% incremental gains. Test new ad copy, test new imagery, test anything you can to improve just a little bit because really, any increase in click through rate goes a long way to get costs down and volume pretty much as high as you need it. I got to consult on an account week that had 4% click through rates on their sponsored content, it was absolutely incredible. They were paying less than 30 cents per click from sponsored content. Oh, my heart just sings when it sees metrics like that. So of course, I was looking at that like a huge win. But then we go back 30 days and see that 30 days ago, the performance they were running at 7% click through rates. And so that means even after click through rates fell to half of what they were, and performance was still amazing. That means back then 30 days ago, they were getting less than 15 cent clicks. It's incredible. So it doesn't matter what kind of performance you're seeing. If your ads have been running for a while, we see that the average is like 27 to 33 days when ads will start to fall off. Meaning if you're looking at their click through rate over time, if you click on the performance chart, and sort by average click through rate. You can watch this happen after about 27 to 33 days of saturating an audience, you'll see your click through rates start to drop off a cliff. So even if you've got great performance, you can make it even better or catch up to where it was at the beginning before the saturation by just changing things up a little bit. You don't necessarily have to change the offer, you can just change the motivation and the imagery that people are actually seeing in the ads. And I would be remiss if I didn't bring up your offer here because we've seen even when you have a good offer that's performing well, launching a new offer can easily double or triple your results. So take a look at all of the different offers that you've run and how they've converted. And try to understand the ones that converted the best. What made them amazing. Can we go and create more offers like that? Do we see people like to attend our webinars? Do we see that they like guides about a certain topic? Or will they convert like crazy on checklists? Those are the things that you'll find out for your own account. And test or try some new offers. We've also seen this quite often where, let's say a guide was converting at 10%, which was a little bit below average, but not terrible. And then we just changed the title, change the name of the guide to maybe just hit on a different motivation or pain point that your customer might be feeling. The content of the white paper, the content of the guide doesn't have to change, it's still gonna cover all of the same great stuff, you're just presenting it in a little bit different of a way. We've seen this literally double conversion rates. And because the design of your guide has already been done, there's not a whole lot of work necessary here to just change the title on a PDF and swap it out on a web page. So there's something that takes very little effort and can really, really pay off. Something else we've found to be insanely successful is to take off your marketing hat and put on your sales enablement hat. Go spend some time with your sales team, show them what your targeting is like show them the ads people are clicking on, show them the guides, people are downloading, get them in the mindset of where they know what their prospects are going through, so they can better tailor the conversations. This will also give you an excuse to learn more and get more feedback from sales that will help you optimize and close that loop quicker. I want to tell you about what I call data journey. Back in 2011, I was spending a good amount on LinkedIn Ads, and LinkedIn didn't even have conversion tracking yet. And of course, it wasn't going to come out for six more years, unfortunately. I was waiting for a long time. But for simplicity, I did all of my optimizations in the account based entirely off of click through rate. I figured that any ad that people clicked on significantly more was probably going to be the most interesting and was probably going to convert the best. Then I started getting access to my conversion numbers. Through analytics, I would run an analytics report, I would run a LinkedIn report, drop them into Excel, marry that data up, and then start doing these calculations of what is my cost per lead?, what is my conversion rate? And this is consequently, when I fell in love with Excel and data. Mmm, sexy, sexy. But as I was doing that, I noticed something that I thought was really strange. There was zero correlation between the ad that had the winning click through rate, and the ones that had the winning conversion rate, it was literally a coin flip, if the ad that I had just promoted to keep running was even the right one to keep promoting. So this opened my eyes quite a bit and I realized, you always want to take action on the results that are closest to the money. That means the furthest down the sales funnel, you can possibly get data, at least at a large enough sample size that it makes any sense. Since the closer you get to the money, the more the data means the more accurate it's going to be. The more predictable it becomes. Then another few months later, I started getting a lot of mq l SQL proposals, closed numbers. And I did the same thing to them. I brought them into Excel and started doing all of this analysis. And I found that for every stage, the ad or the campaign that converted higher, it was a little bit more likely to mql higher, and then even more so an ad or a campaign that mql'd. at a high rate, it was even more likely to sql or proposal and then close at a high rate. So the principle here of this story is that you want to optimize for the deepest sales stage that you have enough data for because you can totally ignore poor click through rates if your conversion rates are amazing or lead quality is so high that you keep closing everyone who clicks. So who cares if an offer converts amazingly well, but you've spent $1 million on it and nothing has turned into close business. Or conversely, if your conversion rate is absolutely miniscule, but every conversion ends up closing, we actually have a client like this right now where their webinar is converting at 6% with cold traffic. And I would have looked at that and said, man, 6%, that's really low for a webinar, we really haven't hit the mark here. Let's go back to the drawing board and try something else. But he is closing business like crazy. And based off of their deal sizes, they are running probably a 10 x ROI Right Now, this can be a little uncomfortable for those of you who are testing, because if you see something performing poorly, you may want to hurry and get rid of the poor performance. But if you can take a look at what's happening after the realm of poor performance, let's say it's a bad click through rate. But wait until you've gotten some conversion and see if it's going to make up for it. And I've mentioned that you want to make sure that you have enough data to actually analyze here. What I found is my results to the click through rate generally becomes statistically significant after about $1,000 in ad spend. Now keep in mind that is in North America and in the English language where it tends to be the most competitive. If as soon as you leave the English language, or really go outside of North America, your costs are going to drop significantly, meaning that you'll probably be able to get enough data for even less money. And if you care about your conversion rates, and your cost per conversion. And again, if you're in North America with a content offer that's converting between, let's say 12 and 15%. It usually takes about $5,000 in ad spend to get statistical significance around those values. And of course, you don't have to spend that over one day or a month even. All you need is that amount of data to attribute. Now all mentioned, if you're not converting at 12 to 15%, let's say you have a harder offer like Get a demo, talk to sales, buy something now, or maybe it is a content offer, it just doesn't convert very high, then be aware, you're probably going to have to spend significantly more in order to get that same level of statistical significance. So I would recommend starting out with a really good content offer. From my experience 95% of the time, the math works out in favor of content, and getting a cheaper cost per lead, but then nurturing that person to a sales conversation, rather than just going immediately for the kill and going right to the sales conversation. But certainly, because it's 95% of the time, you might be that 5%. And so I recommend that everyone test a little bit, and then you'll know for your own brand performance. But if you have to spend $1,000 to get statistical significance for your click through rates, and $5,000 to get statistical significance for conversion rates. To get statistical significance for mql's you may have to spend twice Or three times to get significance around sql's, it might be three or four times more than that. So this is where we depart from where advertising as a creative endeavor and gets way more into an analytical and a predictive one. Any of you who are lovers of data? Oh, the world is yours. I'm calling it 2020 is the year of the technical marketer. Okay, I've got the episode resources for you coming up right after the break. So stick around. 20:32 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 20:43 Okay, I mentioned Episode 23. with Sam Fonoimoana giving his free audit around your targeting, go back and listen to that episode. definitely take advantage of it because this is an audit that you cannot do yourself. Also, we talked a lot about bidding and budgeting and this one So if you need a refresher or want to go a lot deeper, go check out Episode 6, all about bidding and budgeting. And if you are new to LinkedIn Ads, go check out my course on LinkedIn Learning. It's just over an hour long. And it covers pretty much what I would cover if you hired me to come in and train your team one on one. To bring me and it would be $500 an hour, but this course is either free, or I think only $25 if you don't have access to LinkedIn Learning already, so definitely, I know which one I would choose. Take a look down right now at your podcast player and subscribe on whatever player you're listening on. And please do rate the podcast. And of course I would love five stars, but if you just don't think that my poor ginger soul deserves it, well, that's fine, give me four. And please do go leave a review for the podcast. I'd love to shout you out. And especially I'd love to see a review on Stitcher. So those of you who are stitcher users, please go leave your review there. We're up to I think like 25 now on Apple podcasts, which is fantastic. Thank you everyone who's leaving it there. But Stitcher only has one right now and it could use a little bit of love. Any ideas for what you'd like us to cover in the show? Or topics? Or questions? Email us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. I would absolutely love to hear from you. All right with that being said, I will see you back here next week. I'm cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiative.

Show Resources: Episode 10: What should you offer from LinkedIn Ads LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Show Transcript: Marketing and sales funnels with LinkedIn Ads, a match made in heaven or the devil's playground. You're about to find out. 0:13 Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. 0:21 Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. So the topic of funnels is really hot in digital marketing right now. What are they? How do you build one for LinkedIn Ads? And how do you think about LinkedIn ads in the different stages of the funnel? We'll cover all that in more on this episode. This topic was suggested by Antii, one of our listeners. So please do take us up on the suggestion for emailing us at Podcast@B2Linked.com and suggesting topics you'd love to have us cover. In the news Brooke Osmundson, who's the Director of Paid Media at NordicClick Interactive. She's really active on the PPC chat community on Twitter. She brought to a bunch of us advertisers attention that starting around June 16 of 2020. If you're listening to this later, that click through rates were dropping across the board across all of their clients. And we looked into it and notice that ctrs dropped about 10 to 20% across most of our accounts running especially sponsored content, and text ads. So we're not immediately clear on what caused it and we're still investigating, but if any of you are listening who have the same thing, please reach out to us at at Podcast@B2Linked.com. We'd love to help get to the bottom of what in the world could be causing this. Highlighting a few of the reviews that you as listeners have left on the podcast. TheOverwhelmedBrain, says "as a small business owner this show is one of my most important resources. I've been following AJ for a while on YouTube. So glad he's got a podcast so I can listen anytime I want. love this show. So much free advice I'd have to pay for otherwise. Can't Get. Enough already learned so much." Thank you so much, TheOverwhelmedBrain, that warms my heart hearing that. Jacketkicker says "your go to source for LinkedIn ads. AJ's podcast has helped me set up flawless ads for my clients. The advice he gives in this show is priceless. He's also very responsive to questions and comments on LinkedIn. He's been a huge help for my business. Jacketkicker, I am so glad that you've got that much value out of this. It's exactly as intended. And Asmaa, who is a connection of mine on LinkedIn. She's the Community Manager at Clickfunnels. And she says "great show!" "This show is a great choice for every marketer or media buyer who wants to start with or leverage the power of LinkedIn ads. AJ is the go to man for anything LinkedIn related and the show has been very informative, yet not intimidating so far. Great job." Thank you so much Asmaa, I sure appreciate you leaving that and just a shout out as small as the only one who has reviewed us yet on Stitcher. So the majority of you have reviewed us on Apple podcasts. If you happen to look down and see that you're using Stitcher, I would absolutely love it if you could reach out and give us a review. I want to feature you so definitely if you want a shout out, leave a review. Okay with that being said, let's hit it jumping into funnels. 3:14 What Are Funnels? Okay, so what are funnels? There are quite a few different definitions out there. In marketing, we talk about the funnel being something where we take someone from before they know we exist all the way to purchase. You may have heard of things like cold traffic and warm traffic, the know, like, and trust factor around your brand. And one of my favorites is the Aida model, A-I-D-A and it stands for awareness, interest, demand and action. And the concept here is that the majority of people have to learn about you and then trust you before they're ready to buy. I'm sure many of you who came up in in marketing have heard the old adage that someone has to see something seven times before they consider purchasing from you. So that's really the classic definition of a funnel. But in recent years, the concept of the sales funnel has really come into its own in digital marketing. And if I can make my own definition for it, this is a curated experience to get cold traffic as effectively as possible through your sales process. Usually, this happens through a series of content that helps kind of take someone's hand and walk them through the buying and education process without needing to talk to a person. Some of these sales funnels can be completely executed without the person actually having to talk to a human, but a lot of them do mean you will have to talk to a human at the end, but at least by the time they get there, they have been so well educated and qualified that sales' job really is pretty simple. Okay, so how do LinkedIn Ads then fit into funnels? Well, LinkedIn's native targeting, that is the targeting that we've had access to for, you know, basically since 2008. It works amazingly well. Well, targeting cold traffic, these are people who haven't heard of us before, is their first taste of the brand. It gets us in front of very important types of VIP prospects that we wouldn't be able to get in front of otherwise. So every time I run a LinkedIn campaign, I picture this as being cold traffic. This is the first time all of these people have heard of me. And I need to make that kind of impression. If you haven't listened to Episode 10, about offers and calls to action, definitely check that episode out, because it goes a lot deeper here. But on LinkedIn, because this is the first time they've heard of our brand, we need to lead with value first. But it doesn't always make sense to lead with light content. Like here, go read some blog posts, and we'll retarget you later, just because of LinkedIn's high costs. So what we've found to be the most effective is getting someone right to kind of the middle of the funnel here and giving them some kind have content that they find really valuable and gated, turn it into a lead magnet. So these will be things like checklists, cheat sheets, guides, ebooks, webinars, and in person events. And it's this concept of the value exchange. If you're offering something to your prospects, that really does solve a perceived pain point, or satisfies a major curiosity of there's something that they stay up all night thinking about or worrying about, then, of course, they're going to be willing to put in their information and submit a form in order to get it. So your content really does have to be amazing. And then the rest of the funnel, what that looks like LinkedIn kind of brings them in, I like to use the metaphor, we can lead a horse to water, and we can get them to take the first drink, but after that, it's really up to sales. That means we can get someone to fill out the form. But after that, it's really a marketing and nurture approach by sales, to really get rapport and a relationship with that person. So that you can eventually have a sales conversation that turns into a closed deal. Now, this isn't all to say that LinkedIn is only for the top of the funnel, it can be a really good channel for the middle and bottom of the funnel, too. If you are a massive fortune 500 brand who has spent hundreds of millions of dollars advertising to the general public? Yeah, all traffic is going to be pretty much warm traffic at that point. But for the majority of smaller advertisers, those who don't have massive, massive budgets, assume that all of your native targeting is going to be cold traffic. And so if you want to get in front of warm traffic, you're going to want to target things like account lists of companies, you know, you've already had some kind of touch point with, contact lists where you know, these are someone who's a warm prospect to you, or even a retargeting less, where you can then get in front of people who at least they've already been to your website or certain pages of your website. And of course as a performance marketer, your goal is to get a cold prospect as quickly and as cheaply turned into revenue for your company. And so if you are the type of company or brand where you can push someone, you can push cold traffic right into a demo or purchase. That's fantastic, good for you. We found about 5% of the time this works because a brand is either so disruptive, or there's such latent demand in the marketplace for them. And you can get away with that, or they have such a strong brand. But the other 95% of the time, you'll notice getting low click through rates because you're not starting to lead with value. You might see really low conversion rates because you're asking too much too soon. It can be really hard to scale. It's hard to get LinkedIn to send you traffic even if you're bidding high. And of course, as you're bidding higher, you'll notice really high costs per click, which lead to a really expensive cost per qualified prospect. So if this is the case if this is what you're seeing, you know you've got to add at least one more step to the funnel here before you start asking right for a demo or a purchase. So then you start considering, let's try a two step funnel. Remember, we want as few of steps here as possible, because every step we add, takes more time and additional cost in advertising. So now this two step funnel, maybe you're leading with something like a content offer, and then you're retargeting those people with a demo or a purchase. And the guide you're going to use here is your conversion rate. on that first step of the funnel, we're always looking for content that gets 15% or higher conversion rates. And so if you have this content, you know, you're getting a low cost per opt in from your LinkedIn Ads. Now you're going to start watching the second step. So as this traffic graduates from having downloaded a piece of content, so now they should at least know like and trust us to some degree. Now we want to start showing them ads that then push to that demo or purchase. And on those demo and purchase ads, take a look at your click through rates. Are your click through rates low? Or is conversion rate even low or cost per conversion high on this step, that probably means you need to add a third step in your funnel. So you'll want to rinse and repeat through this cycle, adding stages until you find that yes, you have effectively moved cold traffic very efficiently, all the way to where they're willing to talk to a sales rep. This is, make no mistake about it, the holy grail of B2B advertising. 10:36 Here's a quick sponsor break and then we'll dive into nurturing your funnel stages and actually building sequences. 10:42 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts 10:50 If the performance of your LinkedIn ads is important to you B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We manage LinkedIn's largest accounts and are the only ones media buying agency to be official LinkedIn partners and performance to your goals is our only priority. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to get in touch and we'd love to absolutely help you demolish your goals. 11:14 Nurturing Your Funnel Stages Alright, let's jump into nurturing your funnel stages and building these smart sequences. So here are the different tools that you have to actually build sequences. If someone has interacted with a lead gen form in any capacity, they've either clicked on an ad so a lead gen form opened, or they've submitted one, LinkedIn now lets you build retargeting audiences right on the platform for either including or excluding those people. It's fantastic. Same thing goes with video. If they've watched at least two seconds of your video, you can put them into a retargeting audience, and you can segment them by if they've watched 25%, 50%, 75% or even completed your videos. Again, this is for both information And exclusion, which is super important. And we'll get to why. Of course, if you get this traffic to your website or a landing page, you can then do web retargeting on LinkedIn, and start building that audience of at least 300 people who have visited your website. Then there's the list retargeting where you can either get a list of prospects that haven't closed yet, and upload that to LinkedIn and show specific ads just to that cohort. Or maybe you even have a cold list that you've purchased, you can upload that as well. Same thing with company names, if you know that there's a list of companies who have converted, but they have not yet closed into deals for you, then yeah, you can upload a list of those companies and either include or exclude them from your targeting. And if you are in that segment, where you're sending people to your website or a landing page, one of my favorite things is to then retarget that traffic through Facebook and Google's website retargeting. And of course, all of the ads that we launched from LinkedIn have really detailed UTM parameters or tracking parameters in the URL. So you can then go to your Facebook and your Google retargeting campaigns and say, Hey, if UTM_campaign contains the word cmo, create an audience for them that we're going to call chief marketing officers. That's just one example. But you can go pretty ninja here. And of course, you'll probably have email, maybe text, phone calls, all as potential second or third touches here to help you build a sequence. 13:35 Building a Sequence So how do you build a sequence? It's as simple as having some kind of audience that's cold, and we're going to call this our original audience. Then the people from that original audience who took the action that we wanted them to, let's say they submitted the lead gen form. What we would do is create an audience of just those who actually submitted the form and we're going to exclude that same Audience from the original audience. Then we set up a second campaign, one that is only targeting that list of people who took the desired action, our converters, then we can specify a specific message just for them. The same thing goes if you're building more than two steps in your sequences, you can do the same thing by creating a new retargeting audience, and then excluding that from the previous step. So you are graduating people, anyone from the original audience who took the step that you wanted them to, they are now released from that audience, and you're not going to pay for a second click from them from that cold audience. And they are going to be passed into your warm audience. And I think we've got to talk about attribution models here and attribution in general, because it's really easy to think, oh, someone saw my LinkedIn ad, converted, and then came back through a retargeting ad, or a paid search branded ad and then became customer and it's just two quick touch points, one top of the funnel, one bottom of the funnel, and now they're a customer. Hooray, we have revenue. But in actuality, if you go and look at your channel contribution report in analytics, you will see that no one's path to becoming a customer looks quite that easy. It's all over the board. You'll see touchpoints from every possible channel in about every order you can imagine. 15:25 Attribution So I get this question a lot. Okay, so how should you do attribution for LinkedIn ads, should you count first touch attribution or last touch attribution, or w shaped or anything else? For quick definitions here, first touch attribution means the very first time that prospect was introduced to a channel. So let's say LinkedIn is the very first channel they saw, if they convert there, and then end up coming back two or three months through, let's say, Google ads. LinkedIn would still get all of the credit because it was the one who originally found that prospect. They wouldn't have learned about the company if not for them. And then you have last touch attribution, which is exactly the opposite. Whichever marketing channel touched them right before they became a customer, that's the channel that gets the credit. And then you have w shaped because a W has like a peak in the middle, where you give equal credit, maybe to the very first touch, equal credits, the last touch, and then maybe there was a touch in the middle. If they were an inactive prospect that kind of reactivated them. So maybe LinkedIn introduced them to the brand, then they went inactive for a little while. clicked on a retargeting ad in the middle, that kind of brought them back in, and then maybe they ended up clicking on an email and going right to demo. So now LinkedIn, a retargeting, ad, and email all get credit for that customer. So which of these attribution models do I recommend? Well, my preferred method here is something I call any touch attribution. And what that means is because we are only working with the LinkedIn Ads channel, we know that our clients are also doing heavy work on Google, also doing heavy work on Facebook, and a whole host of other channels. Our clients for sure have to figure out what type of attribution model they want to use, they'll decide if it's first touch, last touch, multi touch, W shaped, H shape, I mean, just name a letter here. But what matters to us because we are optimizing this one channel, every single conversion matters to us. We don't need to take into account that one of our conversions only accounted for 33% of a lead. We just need to know that this ad copy and this audience produced a conversion so that we can optimize account performance to get more of that. So we leave it to our client to roll things up to the multi channel level and decide how much credit to give each channel. But we want every possible conversion point from LinkedIn because it is concrete action that someone took so that we can help us optimize the account. And for any one channel, I recommend that everyone adopt this strategy. The way this works in a CRM is that when someone fills out a form, let's say on your landing page, the content of those form fields, as well as the tracking parameters in the URL, get passed into that CRM to either create or update a prospect record. Now, depending on the way your CRM is set up, it might be one of three different ways. The least sophisticated way is, let's say AJ Wilcox is already a lead in your system and AJ just clicked from a LinkedIn ad and filled it out. That existing record might have had a source of, let's say, a Google ad. But now it's going to be overwritten. And that means whoever was responsible for the conversions from Google just lost credit. And now LinkedIn got the credit. So you can tell why this is problematic. We don't want channels overriding each other. But the way we sure like best is when the CRM can collect every different source and just make a list, . You can pattern the whole journey out of which channel each prospect touched. So that means you look at this prospect record for AJ Wilcox, you can see he clicked on a Google ad and then converted from a LinkedIn ad and then opened eight emails and converted on one and became a customer. So if your CRM isn't already set up this way to take every sort of source, and not overwrite, but instead make a list and help you map the customer journey, then maybe you can work with your CRM admin and implement that because it really is amazing data. Great, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around. 19:57 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 20:07 Episode Resources And for your episode resources here, make sure if you haven't already, go back and listen to Episode 10 of this podcast, all about calls to action and offers. You'll be glad you did. Anyone who's new to LinkedIn advertising, check out the course that I did with LinkedIn Learning the links right there in show notes. It's just over an hour long. And it takes you from the very beginning of LinkedIn Ads all the way through intermediate on how the platform works and how to do things. The cost is the best part. It's either zero dollars or $25, depending on your LinkedIn subscription. So definitely check that out. It's the same thing that I would train your team on one on one if you hired me to come and train them, but at $500 an hour that comes in a little bit higher than the $0 or $25. Take a look at your podcast player right now of choice and hit that subscribe button. not already subscribed. And then please, if you like what you hear, definitely do rate the podcast. And I would especially love it if you would leave a review on whatever podcast player you're using. And I do want to shout you out. So please leave that review. I'll shout you out beginning of the show. With any ideas for episodes, anything you'd love to have us cover, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that, I'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources: LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course Free audit - click the scheduling link at the bottom of this article to get it Sam Fonoimoana's email: sam@thestokegroup.com Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.   Show Transcript: Today we're talking about the advanced reporting capabilities for your LinkedIn Ads that you didn't even know were possible. Strap in, and let's do this. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. 0:22 Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. Today I get to introduce you to my secret weapon. Sam Fonoimoana from Stoke Analytics. He's a reporting and data ninja, which you'll absolutely soon find out. And he's got access to LinkedIn Ads API, which allows him to gather data and insights that you won't find in campaign manager for your account. I'm excited to introduce you to him as we are longtime friends, and he's even got a really cool free targeting audit to offer you. So definitely take him up on that. With that being said, let's hit it. 0:58 Alright Sam, thanks so much. Welcome to the podcast. 1:01 Thanks so much AJ for having me. 1:03 So excited to be talking to you here. We've obviously worked together on LinkedIn Ads for a long time. And this is so cool that I get to introduce you to the LinkedIn Ads Show audience, I would love just to have you start telling us about yourself. Tell us about your background and why you do such cool stuff with LinkedIn Ads reporting? 1:21 Well, it's true. Like we we've known each other now for a while, remember our days back at the back of demo working for that company? And you know, data was everything. And we had a lot of fun. I remember you taking that sequel course when we were over there, you did a good job for a marketer. 1:36 Not bad for a marketer. 1:38 Yeah, my world really has revolved around data I started off as a finance guy. And, you know, quickly discovered that if I really want answers to the questions I'm asking as a finance guy, I need more data. And so it just led me down this path of being able to pull the data myself from many different data sources. And really, you know, try to try to answer the questions myself, you know, using this data 2:00 Well, and Sam is crazy impressive. For those of you who don't know, like he said, started out in finance and he is incredible at sequal, incredible at servers, incredible at Python, and, and even more. So just incredible with all kinds of data. And it's been so fun to see him innovating and building stuff specifically around LinkedIn, because that's what I get to use all day. 2:22 Well AJ, I really appreciated working with you over the years. And, you know, working with LinkedIn getting access to that that exclusive LinkedIn API, you know, we have access to more data than then than anyone else trying to go into campaign manager. And it's been a blast, just learning, like what you can do. And I know that's what we're going to talk about today. But there's so much reporting you can do, you know, if we're pulling data straight from the API, and that's what you know that's what we'll talk about today. So 2:49 Cool! All right. We'll get to dive super deep into the kinds of reporting and things that you can pull that like you mentioned, we don't get through campaign manager. I don't want to reveal too much of our secret sauce as an agency, but just a heads up, Sam has built all of our reporting stack, we are able to report on things that not even LinkedIn can report on. And that's really all thanks to him. So super stoked on that. Anyone who's looking to really up your reporting game, check out Stoke Analytics. 3:17 Thanks so much AJ. Thank you. 3:19 Okay, so you've got kind of four different reports that you can give a client who is advertising on LinkedIn. Could you give us a kind of quick rundown on the types of reporting that's available? What we as advertisers can can get with your help? 3:33 Sure. So the first one is, is an ABM report. And it basically just drills a little bit deeper than then LinkedIn. But that'll tell you how your content is resonating with specific targeted accounts you're going after? 3:47 Yeah. And so anyone who is in your ads account, you can go into the analytics into the demographic report, and you can see the last 10 companies that have interacted with your ads, those that have interacted the most or whatever. How deep does your report go? 4:01 You know, we can get, you know, top 100 companies that have interacted, you know, with with your leads, and that's over time. So you know, we can go back by month and and show that for, you know, up to six months back. 4:15 I love that my report I was just looking at has 3,500 companies represented there. So you get a lot more data than we can get through a campaign manager. Then also tell us about your your persona level reports. 4:29 So next one is his persona and as similar to the ABM. You know, for those companies that are specifically targeting, you know, job titles, you know, we can we can do a similar type of report where we can see which content is resonating with specific job titles. 4:42 Cool. I love that the exact ad that the exact job title clicked on and interacted with, you can see which titles tend to win, which titles tend to lose. So we'll go deeper into that one as well. Now, tell us about your most recent one, which is really exciting, the targeting audit that you're offering. 5:00 Right. So this his next one is is our audience targeting audit. And it's it's built to be able to show like for all your campaigns that are using audience targeting, you could see, you know, what percentage of your budget is going towards those audiences you specified. And you know, just as importantly, if not more, you know, how much of your budget is not going towards those. 5:21 Super super valuable to those who are advertising to know how much of your audience is people you actually chose versus those who don't? So these three reports are really cool for LinkedIn advertisers. What else do you offer? I mean, what is your agency offer to everyone? 5:37 I mean, really, our agency is focused around customer journey analytics and so you know, we're really good at integrating multiple different systems, all CRM to web analytics, web analytics to AD platforms. And you know, that really is our bread and butter. We're Adobe's official partner to do any, any Salesforce or dynamics integrations into into Adobe products. I mean, they just Trust us to do that integration. And yeah, that's that's where we focus on customer journey. It's where it's at. 6:05 I love it. And I can I can say an amen to that because we've been using your, your whole suite of reporting and analytics for years and years. So thanks for hooking us up there. 6:14 You got it, AJ. 6:15 Okay, so let's dig specifically into the targeting audit, because this is something that you're offering to any of our listeners for free, dive way deep tell us like, what are the capabilities? What are they going to be able to find, etc. 6:28 I mean, I think what's attractive about the LinkedIn platform is that you can target you can set up your campaigns to target audiences better than any other platform. You know, the the platform, however, it doesn't really give good optics into how that targeting is performing. And so this audit will go in and will pull any pull all of your campaigns that use some sort of audience targeting and basically just show you. It'll show you the total number of dollars that is being spent outside of audiences that you've specified. 7:01 And this works by what sort of targeting facets? Can we look by job title? Can we look at job function? Can we look at company sizes? You know those types of things? 7:10 Yep. So we can look at job title, seniority, company, industry, company size, location. I believe there's one more, but those are the main ones that people seem to be interested in. 7:26 Awesome. So you can take a lookat specifically your targeting that you've selected for a campaign. And it will tell you how much of your budget, how many of your clicks, how many of your impressions came from that audience versus audiences you didn't explicitly choose? 7:41 That's right. And I was able to, to build this with your help AJ, so you know a little bit about this. And in the early stages, it was interesting to see because you would think that, you know, if you explicitly targeted let's say, a job title such as CEO, you would think that LinkedIn would dedicate the majority of of that campaign spend towards that job title. But you know, in our early test so far, we've seen like, you'll, be surprised there's big chunks of, of campaign budget that's outside of those job titles. 8:11 Yes. And there are opportunities to use this information to tighten up our targeting and make us even more efficient, which is nice. I don't want this to feel like we're crapping on LinkedIn as a platform, because, you know, their targeting doesn't actually hit who it does. We find both winners and losers in this report. And we can actually take action on that to improve things. So I think this is still really valuable for anyone. And because this is a free audit, any of you guys listening, can go get this audit for your account and see what percentage of your budget is allocated to people that you haven't explicitly chosen, which on an expensive platform like LinkedIn, I mean, every dollar every click, you can save is such a good thing. 8:56 Yeah, that's right. I mean, I would just add, it's like you said, there's both winners. You know, and losers, like we, you know, there's one use case where we find a job title that wasn't included, but the click through rate was way higher, the cost per click was way lower. And so instead of getting angry that they're happy about that, oh, we're just gonna, we're gonna add this to the campaign and get more of that traffic. 9:16 Oh, yeah, in fact, I remember seeing an example on one of our accounts, where one of our job titles that was being included that we didn't explicitly say, had something like a 2.3% click through rate, I think was like VP of sales or something. And so we went and explicitly added that as like, yes, this campaign wants to target this job title. And we saw a couple others, where spend was going and we went out, those are not the right title. We could go in and explicitly add them as an exclusion, which is really cool. All right. So for anyone who wants to get this audit on their account, how do they get in touch with you? How do they get ahold of this free audit so they can get ahold of me I'll leave my my contact information, but it's a quick process. You basically just set up a meeting with me. You invite one of our our LinkedIn user accounts to your campaign manager to your ad account, the one that you'd like to have the audit on. And then we'll have this spun up for you. And within 24 hours, email you the link, and then we can go through the audit results to help you interpret the results. 10:17 Very cool. So this is something I encourage every one of you listening to take Sam up on. Super, super valuable even as just insights to verify the targeting strategy that you're using. This is really, really cool. I like I said, we've used it for all of our accounts. And it's helped us to take some actions that have improved performance significantly. I'll make sure that that Sam's email address and web address are all in the show notes so you know exactly how to go and get there. So what are some of the actions that advertisers can take if they are looking at this audit and they see, oh, man, this percentage looks really high towards audiences. I'm not explicitly targeting, what sort of actions can we take? 10:56 There's three main actions you can take off of the audit. The first one is, you can already check on the audience expansion, if there's like a, let's say there's 65% plus of your budget that's going to outside audiences, then you can go in and double check that audience expansion is not enabled. And automatically, that's going to cut down that percentage, you know, if you do have it enabled, and you don't want those broad matches, you can go ahead and uncheck that. So that's one quick one. Second thing is you can go through and exclude any any losers. You know, instead of just saying, hey, just include this audience, but you don't do an exclusion, you can go in and explicitly exclude clear cut losers. And then the third thing is, is the opposite of that you can come in and include any winners kind of like that, that use case that you're talking about AJ. 11:49 I love that. And for any of you who've listened to more than one episode, you know, my stance on audience expansion. I absolutely hate it. I think it should be not included on any campaign, but certainly if you use the audit and you do see, you know, we had a situation where we did the audit pre and post removing audience expansion. And we saw a 20% difference. I mean, it was like, night and day between using audience expansion and the types of roles you're reaching that you wouldn't want to necessarily versus not. And from using this, what are some of the results you've been able to see? I mean, I can share what we've seen by by using the audit, but I wonder some of the other results that your other clients have seen? 12:30 Sure. So we, you know, we had a large client of ours who spends quite a bit on LinkedIn every month. And, you know, they they definitely went through and double, you know, double checked all the audience expansion, they went ahead and excluded some clear cut losers. And, you know, in in one case, they just had spent so much money on a on a job title that's so far outside of the, of the target audience that, you know, they went back to LinkedIn, they're still kind of in the process of trying to negotiate a credit and that's no good. guarantee, but just because they had spent so much money on it, you know, they felt like they had to go back to LinkedIn. And so these are some of the things that our customers are doing with it. I mean, for sure you can you can streamline that campaign and you can get more optimized with this data. And then who knows, maybe you can win some credits back. I don't know. 13:19 So when you're looking at the results of your audit, what are you going to see? Can you tell us the specifics here? 13:25 Sure that there's four main sections of the audit. The first one up at the top, you'll see the overall dollar amount spent on other audiences. And then the next thing you'll see is a pie chart and it'll show you the spend percentage breakdown, you know, targeted audiences versus other audiences. So that's quick, easy reference. Third thing is it'll show each campaign and it'll break down that campaign you'll be able to see if it has audience expansion enabled on the campaign. And you'll also be able to show you know, the dollar spent on targeted versus other audiences by campaign That way you can click on any campaigns that are just way off. And then that that'll that'll filter the last part of the audit, which shows you every single audience that has received impressions and clicks on that campaign. And then you'll be able to see, hey, this was this was part of my targeting. And it'll also identify, hey, these ones are not part of the targeting, but are still spending dollars against the campaign. 14:24 Very cool. All right so anyone listening, make sure you hit pause on the podcast right now, go in order your audit so that it's running and you'll get to see this 24 hours from now. And then specifically around the other reporting that you offer. Tell us about what you offer. I'd love to know how much it costs, you know what we all get access to as advertisers by getting to work with you. 14:47 Sure. So you know, for the full ABM reporting, you know, job title reporting and for the targeting audit ongoing, you know, we try to we try to keep it fairly cheap for advertisers. It'll run between $100 and $400 a month if you're just depending on on your spend levels. And, you know, it's quick, it's automated and you'll have it whenever you need it. 15:13 Awesome. Let's dive into the the ABM report. Can you give us specifics? Like when we're looking at the ABM report, what exactly are we going to see? What sort of insights is it going to give us? 15:23 You know, for the ABM report, it's useful to see you know, which ads are resonating with with targeted accounts. I know for for a lot of our customers they're trying to go after certain accounts. The content team is coming up with so many different ads hoping that it's, it's going to be sticky, you know, with these targeted accounts, and they don't really have a good way of measuring it. So this report will help you to see like what really is, you know, sticky with with your targeted accounts, and what's not, I mean, because that's the last thing you want to be is, is noisy, you know, to your targeted account, and this will clearly help you to be able to see that 15:59 Yeah. So you'll get to see your impressions, your clicks, by company, your click through rates, your, if they're filling out forms, either lead gen form or landing page, you'll get to see which companies are converting. You'll be able to sort them, you'll be able to see the exact ads that people from those companies have interacted with, clicked on. I'll just add my, my voice to this. It's incredible. We use this for all of our clients and gives us pretty significant ammo that we can bring to our client reporting every week. 16:32 Awesome, AJ. Yep. 16:34 All right. So let's also talk about the persona reporting, because the persona reporting is really similar to the ABM. It's just, it's targeting the persona rather than the company. Walk us through what we're gonna be able to see by looking at the persona reports. 16:48 Yeah, it's similar to the ABM one, you'll be able to see by by job title, you know, which ads are resonating and which ones are not. All those same metrics that you had mentioned. You know, same same type of things. So we can see clicks, impressions spanned. If it's a video, you can see video start, percentage of completed videos, all those different metrics. And I think for us the use case. You know, one of the big use cases that we've had is, there's companies that, you know, for example, one of our customers, they started this new campaign, they're really trying to penetrate the mind share of, you know, three, three different personas. One of them CMO, the other one is CIO, and the last one is this new, CRO, Chief Revenue Officer. And so with this reporting, it was awesome, were able to bring to light that they were killing it with CMO and CRO, like a lot of the content that they were serving up to these job titles. They're very engaging high click through rates, low cost per low cost per leads. And then for the CIO, it was also able to reveal that there wasn't one CIO, there wasn't one CIO click, I think we looked over a three week period. They were kind of kicking themselves, but that It is important to know. You have to know what's resonating and what's not so you can swap it out. The last thing you want to be as noisy tier two target audiences. 18:09 Oh, yeah. And it's important for advertisers to not take it so hard if you launch an ad to a persona, and it's a total miss. It's, it really is valuable to see that miss to know how you can change. It certainly doesn't reflect on you as a marketer, like, oh, you were really bad at predicting. Predicting is what it is. We can do really poorly and still learn from it and do great afterwards. One thing I really love about this report, I don't know if this is something that that is going to be publicly offered. But we were able to break down not only the job title, but also the job function of, of these personas. And it was really cool to see the exact job titles and what LinkedIn which job functions LinkedIn considers them, to be with him. So that was really insightful information for us being able to not only include/exclude job titles, but also do the same thing for job functions. 19:04 Yep, job function is definitely available as well. 19:07 And then of course, you offer reporting that is not just for LinkedIn. I mean, obviously, we're friends specifically because you've got really cool stuff. I mean, we're friends, because you're awesome. But then we're, especially friends because of the insights you give us into LinkedIn Ads, but you do not just LinkedIn. What are the other channels that you bring into your reporting? What sort of insights are you providing for your other clients? 19:29 I mean, really, our our company, I think I mentioned it before, but we're all about true customer journey analytics. And so that's every you know, from from the first ad click from the first visit to a person's website all the way to the first dollar of sale. I mean, we're we're gathering data from all the platforms. So from all the platforms Facebook, LinkedIn, Bing, Google Ads, and from all the different web analytics platforms, we have connectors into all those. Very importantly for B2Bs, the CRM system, Salesforce and Dynamics. We are well versed in all these different platforms and, and really how to stitch them together in the right way so you can see the full customer journey. 20:10 Oh, yeah, Google Analytics, Adobe analytics, every platform you can think of Stoke does it. So I can testify. Sam, tell us where we can find you. We'll have links in the show notes. But how do people follow up with you? How do people follow you how to people learn more? Sure, if you want to check out our website at stokedata.com. And you'll see a little bit more about some of the things we've talked about today and in our other services. And then of course, you can find me on LinkedIn, Sam Fonoimoana and then my email address is Sam@thestokegroup.com 20:44 Love it. Sam, thanks so much for sharing your awesome findings and what you're offering with us today. I'm really excited for other people to see the audit and get to take a peek at what they're doing on LinkedIn and how to further improve because that's what we're all about here at the LinkedIn ads show. 20:59 Awesome AJ. Thanks so much for having me. Thank you. 21:03 So there you have it ladies and gentlemen. Reporting you didn't even know was possible on your LinkedIn Ads initiatives. I'll share Sam's contact info right after this. 21:18 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 21:28 All right, as promised, here's the episode resources. So we've included the link in the show notes down below, or on the B2linked.com/podcast website, if your show notes don't have it. So check that one out. Absolutely, go get that free audit. And then if you want to contact Sam Fonoimoana his email address is Sam@thestokegroup.com. So you'll find his email address down below there as well. If you are new to LinkedIn advertising, you'll want to check out the LinkedIn learning course that I did all about LinkedIn Ads. The link for that down below as well. Or you can just navigate right to LinkedIn learning or lynda.com and search for the LinkedIn ads course you'll see my face there. This course is either free or I think $25. So it is a smoking good deal, considering if you hired me to come in and train your team, the same thing would cost somewhere around $750 in training time, so definitely well worth boning up on that. Look down at your podcast player right now and hit the subscribe button. And please do go into wherever you're listening and leave us a rating. And I would love it if you would leave us a review as well. I will shout you out if you review us. So if you want that shout out definitely take me up on that. And then with any ideas, any any suggestions, anything you'd like us to cover, reach out to Podcast@B2linked.com and I would love to take those and incorporate those into future episodes. Okay. With that being said, I'll see you back here next week, Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources: LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course Engagement Retargeting Announcement What should you offer from your LinkedIn Ads? - The LinkedIn Ads Show Episode 10 A Guide to LinkedIn Ads Targeting Options - The LinkedIn Ads Show Episode 11 Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Show Transcript: You've been testing LinkedIn Ads and results look great. And now you want to scale up. Here's your playbook for scaling efficiently. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. 0:21 Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. I once had a boss who said that you can scale up, or you can optimize costs down, but you can't do both. Thank goodness, he was dead wrong. We're going to show you how you can scale and keep slash improve your efficiency. Okay, into the news section. I just realized that I haven't covered the release of engagement retargeting in the news. I blabbed about it on LinkedIn, but I never even mentioned it on the podcast. If you listen to Episode Three, where I was talking about roadmap, I let you know this was coming out. And I also let you know that this is the feature that I was most excited about. But then I didn't even mention it in the news. Okay, so here's the story. When it was announced on June 3 of 2020, about a quarter of users had it rolled out and then it rolled out about a quarter every week. So by the time you're listening to this podcast, everyone here should have it. And what this is, it's the ability to retarget lead generation form openers, and lead generation form submitters. We'll talk here in a minute why this is monumental. It can also retarget video viewers, anyone who watched at least two seconds, anyone who watched 25% of it 50%, 75% and completion. And it's important to understand this is both from an include and an exclude, meaning you could create a funnel that's like, if you watched 75% of my video, exclude those people from my original audience. And now I want a retargeting audience that all it does is show ads to the people who watched at least 75% and maybe I'm showing them the next one in the sequence. 2:00 So of course, including is cool, but excluding to me is always cooler. The other cool part about this is it there's a 100% match rate. If you're on LinkedIn, LinkedIn knows who you are, and they're tracking what content, what forms you're interacting with. And so it's not like website retargeting where traffic hits your landing page and you lose half of your audience because they don't accept cookies. This is 100% of the people who open your form, submit it, or watch any portion of your video end up becoming as part of your retargeting audience. Super, super cool. I am ecstatic about this. We really haven't done much with LinkedIn video ads, because when we've compared effective cost per click, and effective cost per conversion, video always tends to be, not always, in most cases, LinkedIn ads video tends to be more expensive than static. And so we've just said, well, without retargeting, why would we care? Why don't we just launch static ads instead? Now that we have retargeting. I'm gonna start recommending LinkedIn video ads quite a bit more often. It's this level of control. It was one of the table stakes that I needed before I could start actually recommending it. And you'll see in the show notes, a link to the announcement that I actually helped with on searchenginejournal.com. 3:15 At the same time, they also announced the LinkedIn audience network partners. Now in the future, we're going to have a whole episode about LinkedIn audience network. And I get a lot of questions about this. But what was so cool to me about the announcement here is for the first time, LinkedIn actually shared some of the sites that are off of LinkedIn that your ads can show up on. Now they have, as far as I know, over 1000 of these sites that are super handpicked, they are nuts about quality over there. They never want your ads showing up on a Breitbart and ending up hurting your brand. But they've never actually mentioned any partners. And quite frankly, I don't really frequent the sites that the ads are showing up on so I didn't really have much of an idea. Like I mentioned in the last episode, I've been privy to some of these sites, just from private conversations with LinkedIn product managers. But under NDA, I wasn't allowed to share them. Okay, so now they gave us three examples that I can share. They mentioned the Flipboard app, which a lot of people consume news on tablets. They also mentioned msn.com, and Microsoft news. And these make a lot of sense there, Microsoft properties, tight control owned by Microsoft, yada, yada. And then of course, they have a bunch of other hand picked ones that they haven't announced yet. But the second, they're public, I'm going to add them into the news section. So keep staying subscribed. And if I can get real with you guys for a minute, just some real talk here. I'm spending about four hours of prep and researching on each episode. And that's what the whole team supporting me with editing and publishing. Thank you, Matt and Lindsey, I know you guys are listening. I'm also running B2linked.com the whole agency and writing a book and I have four kids and a lovely wife who all like it when I'm around. So I'm having a tough time keeping up with the pace and I would love to hear your feedback on these two things. And I don't want you thinking, "oh, AJ doesn't want to hear for me". Absolutely. I'm talking to you, I want your feedback on these things, because I really can't, I can't make these decisions without your input. Okay, So question number one, do we dwell too much on details? For instance, would you be happy with it if I were just to say, and if your click through rate is over 1% on sponsored content, that means that it's a good time to switch to auto bidding, you'll end up saving money. Instead of what I might normally say, which is, here's the background on the differences between CPC bidding and auto bidding. And here's why each bid level affects your campaigns the way it does, etc, etc. Number two that I'd like your feedback on is length. Right now I basically plan out a pretty in depth topic and I talk for as long as it takes to cover the subject. Sometimes it's as low as 30 minutes. Sometimes it's over an hour. And I've heard feedback from some of you that people like 20 ish minute podcasts, and this is a little bit foreign to me. Because I personally really love long podcasts, but would you like them to be shorter? Would you like them to be more specific in topic? So Email us at Podcast@B2linked.com. You'll see that down in in the show notes and let me know seriously i'd absolutely love to hear from you on this because if you want less depth less details, if you want shorter than honestly these would take me a lot less time to create but you know, in depth is kind of my style if you haven't gathered already, so please let me know. 6:31 Okay, highlighting reviews. Michelle Araiza writes "the ultimate LinkedIn Ads podcast for the modern marketer". "AJ is the LinkedIn Ads pioneer and breaks down the topics very well for beginners. He's tested every LinkedIn Ads feature and honestly shares his experience and best practices. This podcast is a marketers must for staying relevant in digital marketing." Now, Michelle, I happen to know she runs demandgen at an awesome San Francisco cloud tech company. She's a stellar marketer in her own right, so Michelle, thank you so much for the kind review. It's that much more meaningful coming from you. And I do try really hard to honestly share. Sometimes what I share is hot takes sometimes I know LinkedIn doesn't actually appreciate my advice that I'm giving people. But I feel really strongly that you guys deserve to honestly know the things that the platform can't tell you. Yeah, we've spent $135 million so far on LinkedIn ads, and we figured out a lot of potholes because we've stepped in them. We found a lot of cool hacks, things that worked unexpectedly, and that's what I'm seeking to share with you. And so I hope that's really appreciated. 7:35 Then alo marketing writes "love AJ!" "AJ podcasts are full of great information that you can put into action. I have enjoyed all his podcasts and look forward to listening to more." Alo marketing, I checked them out their local agency in New Jersey and Alice I stalked you on LinkedIn and just wanted to personally say thank you for that awesome review. Then Michael A Manzur writes, "wow powerful show with actionable practical tips". Now I know Michael, he's a he's an incredible LinkedIn ads marketer in South Florida. And he knows the South Florida market. He knows the Spanish speaking and English speaking markets really well there. You're going to be hearing a lot more from Michael, I'm sure soon. And I want to feature you, so please leave your reviews on whatever podcast player or service that you're using. I would love to hear your feedback. And a little bit more real talk here. I feel like a total douche reading reviews that praise me as like being amazing. So do share whatever you want. I want honest reviews, and I will read them word for word. But if you can make me sound a little bit more humble, I'd turn less red while I'm reading them. 8:41 Okay, with that being said, let's hit it. We're gonna use an example here of scale, saying that if you have a target audience of 10,000 people, which I'm using this for a nice round number. If you've listened to other episodes, you may know that I really like audiences between about 20,000 and 80,000 people in them, but nice round number here of 10k. So you have an audience of 10,000, let's say 1,000 of them are active on LinkedIn each day. So that's a big assumption, but let's say about 10% of them are going to be on LinkedIn at least once a day. And if you're having success, and you want to scale, there are three levers that you can pull. Assuming you can't impact how active your audience is on LinkedIn, that would be the fourth lever, if you could turn that up. But the other three levers that you can control, we're going to go through each one in order of priority. Your first lever here for scaling up is to increase your audience size. Now, there are two different ways you could do that. You could either number one, target the same persona in just new ways. So you've got the same target audience, you're just finding different ways of targeting that same person, and this is the preferable way. The other way is to actually expand your audience to target more personas. So the lowest hanging fruit here is to target the same persona, but just target them in different ways. If you listen to Episode 11, on the in depth types of targeting, you'll get more detail here. But basically, the way that LinkedIn can put people into buckets for you, as an advertiser to advertise to, is totally based off of how complete their profile is, and how much they share. And so as you use different types of targeting, you get access to potentially different people who still really fit your ideal criteria. For instance, if you're targeting just by job title, LinkedIn only understands about 30% of job titles. And that means that you're only reaching about 30% of your audience, which seems like a big opportunity if you're going man I wish we had about I don't know the other 70% of our traffic, 10:44 then you might want to expand into something like job function with seniority. And job function is your department, which is really broad, but it is significantly cheaper on a cost per click basis and can get you a ton more impressions more volume of clicks. So if you can fit your audience nicely into a whole department with their seniority, then that's a great one to use. We also really love using groups a lot of times with seniority. Skills with seniority. We like taking existing audiences and creating look alike audiences from them. And that can help us reach new audiences and test them in their own right. There's also account based marketing, if you bring your specific list of companies. Now I realize you're probably already targeting the same companies through your native targeting. So this may not actually act as an expansion to your campaigns. But who knows, maybe this is a new set of companies that you're not reaching elsewhere, and this could be a good way to expand. Also, when you're doing account based marketing, you don't necessarily just need to go after the people who feel your pain. So if you're selling a software, and an individual contributor is the one who uses it. They're the ones who understand the value of saving the time or the hassle or whatever you provide. If you're targeting just by specific companies, you can be a little bit more liberal, you can target the individual contributor, you can target their manager, maybe even all the way up to the C suite. You can target finance, who's probably going to be signing the contract. You could if it's a small company, you could target the company owner, who's probably going to be involved in that decision, too. So if you're doing account based marketing, you can be a little bit more broad about your roles in an effort to just give that buying committee a big digital hug. If you have email lists from somewhere else, especially if those emails are possibly not found within your existing target audiences. You can scale by uploading lists. This is a great way. And last episode, I think you can hear the like the cringe in my voice. But this is a possibility, there is that checkbox called audience expansion and in my mind, I'm going nooooo, don't mention it. I usually say uncheck that. But really if managing your LinkedIn ads campaigns is a huge pain for you, because you're managing so many other channels and you just don't have time to get strategic, then hitting that one checkbox can give you access to new audience, even though it won't be efficient, it won't be transparent, but it is a possibility. 13:16 Okay, so for an example here, our audience size of 10,000, maybe we were targeting them by job title. And if we add on a skills plus seniority version, now this new audience has 30,000 people in it. And of course, there will be some overlap between your 10,000 campaign and your 30,000 campaign. And that's totally okay. You don't get punished in any way for overlap. But even if there's 100% overlap, you still tripled your audience reach and this will help you expand. You may be thinking these are the same people, but we're just targeting them differently. But my argument here is yes, you are targeting theoretically the quote unquote same people it but now we're doing it in different ways. And by doing This we are making up for where LinkedIn doesn't have the profile data, maybe they haven't filled out their profile all the way. And we can still reach the right people. And by using this strategy, we've been able to double or even triple our audience sizes, which is fantastic. And this tells us that despite just using different targeting methods, we're actually reaching new audience members as well. Because if we've maxed out one type of targeting, and we add new on and we can double or triple our level of spend, we know we're reaching new people that we weren't reaching before. The other way I mentioned of expanding your audiences is to target more personas, you're expanding the roles that you're going after. So for instance, if you're only going after individual contributors, if the seniority called senior that LinkedIn lists, maybe it makes sense to move upstream a little bit, so maybe you want to start targeting manager seniority or director seniority, maybe those who are decision makers, maybe they can engage in your product as well. Same type of thing with company sizes. If you're focused specifically on let's say company sizes 500 to 1,000. What if you move down market a little bit? What if you did the 200 to 500, or maybe even larger, you're going for 1000 to 5000. You can expand that way, and really increase your audience size. If you're already targeting specific industries, you can target more industries, or even just remove the industry filter altogether and hit the relevant roles in all industries. Maybe you can even target other roles entirely within the companies. So if you're targeting just engineers, for instance, just developers, maybe you can target like IT managers or someone else, obviously, as long as they're relevant. Okay, so the example here is maybe your 10,000 person audience is mostly individual contributors. And then when you added in manager seniority, it jumps up to 20,000. And so now you're reaching 30,000 people which tripled your audience size. So as long as this makes sense As I never recommend spending LinkedIn money on audiences who aren't going to be a great fit for you, but if it does make sense to go after other roles, a wider variety of companies, then this can work great. It's important to understand that expanding your audience should scale linearly. And that means that as you increase your audience size, your costs per should not increase, or at least not significantly. We had a client that we followed exactly the same process, and we were able to nine x their budget. And as we multiplied their traffic and leads by nine, our cost per lead actually dropped a little bit. So this is what you should expect. You're reaching new audiences who should hopefully be just as excited about your product as your original audiences were. 16:50 Okay, your second lever, let's say you've totally maxed out your audience. It doesn't make sense to target any more of them or target them in any other ways. Now, your net lever is going to be getting a higher percentage of your existing audience to take action. And really, this means increasing your click through rates. So if you have an audience of 10,000 people, and let's say 1,000 of them are active on each day, you can have a sponsored content ad that's performing above average. So let's call it .5%, half of a percent. And that means that you're only getting five clicks per day from that campaign. So what if we could launch an ad that gets double the click through rate, we're getting a 1% click through rate. Now, all of a sudden, it's the same audience, we're doubling the traffic that it's sending. And this will also scale linearly. In fact, it scales better than linearly, because as your click through rates go up, your cost per click will likely come down, at least somewhat. I mean, usually we see if a click through rate with doubles, we can usually get you know 30 cents to a $1.50 off of each click. And so if you have control over the ad copy, maybe you're changing motivations in the ad copy, maybe you're changing imagery to get people to, we call them a thumb stoppers, get people to stop scrolling, and pay more attention to your awesome ad copy. Maybe your offer isn't very attractive and no matter how many ads you write, you can't get people to click on that at a higher rate. Maybe it's time for a new offer. We've found in a multitude of ad copy tests that with any given offer, we can sway performance by 5% to 15% by changing imagery, changing ad copy, just trying to capture them a little bit better. And this is usually something that ad managers have at their disposal. Usually you can write ad copy. I mean, sometimes I know it has to go through legal and approval and all that. But a lot of times this is something that marketers can do very rapidly to test and find out ways that you can get your click through rate higher. Generally, I don't care about click through rates all too much. Because as long as I'm spending my budget, and I'm only paying when someone clicks, then why would I care about how many people actually saw it before they clicked? Well, this is one of those circumstances, if you're looking to scale, you're going to try to max out these audiences. And now you'll have to pay a little bit more attention to, to click through rates and impression counts, which is something that PPC, advertisers don't really get into all too much. We're usually a lot more focused on click through rate cost per click and cost per conversion. To sum this one up, this is a great way to expand, but sometimes you can't control, Maybe you've done all of the ad copy testing, you can around your existing offer, and maybe you've improved performance by 5% to 15%. But you can't go more than that, then it's probably a good chance that you'll need to create a new offer, which I realize is a big deal. It's a big undertaking to create a whole new offer, if you don't already have a content team working on something like that. Okay, after a quick sponsor break, we'll dive into the third way you can scale your campaigns. 19:57 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com the LinkedIn Ads experts. 20:06 If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you, B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We managed LinkedIn's largest accounts. We're the only media buying agency to be official LinkedIn partners. And of course, your performance to your goals is our only priority. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2linked.com to get in touch, and we'd love to help you absolutely demolish your goals. 20:29 Great, let's jump into the third lever that you have to pull to scale your LinkedIn Ads account spending strategically and efficiently. This third lever is to show more impressions, which basically means you're going to bid more. Okay, so for an example, you have this audience of 10,000. 1,000 of them are active on LinkedIn every day. If your bids are too low, they're too restrictive. They may be making your ads only eligible to be shown to let's say, 200 of the thousand people who are acting So if you go and raise your bids by 50 cents, or $1 per click, that makes it a little bit more worth LinkedIn's while to to show your ads. So now they may show you to 500 of the 1000. Keep in mind that there is a point of diminishing returns, and you will find it as you continue to increase your bids. So I'm going to walk you through a very real example here. Let's say we want more volume, and our bids are at a $7 CPC. Now we know that we're going to pay really close to our bid. So let's say we're paying about $6.90, we go and raise our bids to an $8 CPC. So we've raised it $1. And now our ads are being shown to 500 out of 1,000 people, and now we're paying probably $7.90. So again really close to our bid. But now we're still not getting as much traffic as we want. So we increase our bids to $10 per click. And now our ads are being shown to 950 out of 1,000 people Now our cost per click are really close to $10. Let's say it's $9.80. So the result here is now we're paying $3 more per click than when we started, and it gave us nearly double the traffic. But if we have a conversion rate of 10%, that means that your cost per lead just went up by $30. And maybe this is worthwhile for you so we can keep going. Now, you don't know that you've pretty much maxed out your audience, because in this example, I'm telling you that you know, we reach 950 of the thousand people. But LinkedIn doesn't tell you how active your audience is, they don't tell you the number of total impressions possible from your audience. So let's say you're saying, wow, I just really need more traffic. So you go and increase your bids to $14 per click, so you increased by $4. And now you're probably paying somewhere close to about $13.70. Well, now you're bidding so aggressively that LinkedIn gave you all thousand people, so you get access to all thousand to show them an impression. But now you're literally paying twice as much per click, you're now paying almost $14 per click where you started out paying only $7 per click before. So now your cost per lead doubled, and you only got 50 more impressions than when you were bidding $10 or $4 less per click. So certainly that's not worth it. And it's helpful to find that line of diminishing returns. And I don't have a great formula for you here. You know, we usually gut check it will we'll be watching our effective cost per click. Over time as we were making these changes, and we're also watching our impression volume. And if we see our cost per click spiking up, but impression volume not changing, then we know we've really maxed out that audience. And this works no matter how you're bidding if you're bidding by cost per click, cost per impression, or even auto bidding. You can chart your effective cost per click over time, and you can chart your impressions there with the performance chart button. We never want to cross this diminishing returns line. That is unless you have a massive budget, and it's worth it for you to pay a lot more to get a proportionally smaller audience. If you pull this third lever of increasing your bids, it's really super easy to scale. As long as you're not near that line of diminishing returns. It's super easy to just go and increase bids and watch your traffic jump up, but certainly realize that this negatively affects your efficiency. So if you're trying specifically to stay below a certain cost per lead, or cost per conversion, or some kind of other action, realize that the more you scale this up linearly, it's going to change your cost per click. Because of this, I think this lever is one that I will only pull when I have exhausted the first two levers. I've expanded my audience every way I can. And I've also done a lot of testing on my ad copy to try to improve that way before I ever bid up. Or hey, maybe this is the first lever you pull when you're VC funded. Hey, oh! Just kidding. What I want you to get out of all of this is that scaling up doesn't have to cost more, you don't have to lose efficiency. You'll want to start out by maxing out your audience targeting and personas first. Then as soon as you've scaled them up as far as they'll go without increasing bids, then you can work on getting your click through rates up. And as you know from Episode 10, coming out with a new offer can work wonders here for improving your click through rates. Remember, if you have a bad offer, there's only so much lipstick you can put on that pig. There's only so many ad copy variations you can try without realizing that it's really hard to get people to click on something that's not interesting. And then only then do you want to increase your bids and make sure to increase your budgets at the same time because you never want to hit your budgets during the day. Remember my rhyme if you hit your budgets during the day, you paid too much for clicks along the way. It rhymes so it must be true. So follow these steps and you'll reliably and profitable Be able to scale your LinkedIn ad successes as high as the network will support. Okay, so here are the episode resources for you. 26:13 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 26:22 We talked in the news section about the engagement retargeting announcement, you'll see a link to the Search Engine Journal article that details why that's so cool. You'll also see links to Episode 10 on offers that we've mentioned and Episode 11 about targeting. If you are new to LinkedIn ads or just need to get up leveled, check out the course that I did with LinkedIn learning.com. You'll see a link for that right in the show notes. It's either cheap or free, and it covers about the first hour and a half of what I cover when I train teams one on one and I charge $500 an hour. This course is either $25 or free. I can tell you which one I'd suggest Pull out your phone right now look at the podcast and make sure you've hit that subscribe button. If you like this content, of course, I don't want you forcing yourself to listen if this is boring, but I'd love to be in your ear holes for future episodes. And then please do rate and review this podcast. It's going to help other LinkedIn Ads marketers find it. And of course, I'll get a chance to shout you out, too. If you have any feedback for the podcast, any questions, any topics that you'd want us to cover? Email us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And of course, please do answer my two questions that I threw out there in the news section. I would love to hear from you on this to decide how we work with the show up here in the future. Okay, with that being said, I'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives!

Show Resources: LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Show Transcript: LinkedIn is the only way to reach your ideal target audience, and your event is less a week away. What do you do? This is high urgency strategies on LinkedIn Ads. 0:17 Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. 0:24 Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. So LinkedIn Ads is a great ad network. When you're targeting just evergreen audiences on a consistent pace. You put interesting offers in front of the ideal audience, and then you wait for them to come to you. Every once in a while though, we run into situations where we need to spend budget quickly. Maybe you have a webinar in three days and signups are low. Maybe you have an in person event coming up soon, or an offer that's expiring. Whatever the reason, it can be really difficult to spend both quickly and efficiently on LinkedIn. So today, we're specifically going through the strategies for accelerated delivery. So you can hit your goals without wasting your hard earned budget. So in the news this week, LinkedIn did a poll of its members, and found some pretty interesting statistics. And I'm just gonna read these off, it was in a private deck or something that I can't link to. So you'll just have to listen really closely to get these these benefits out of it. So 43% of respondents are now working remotely. That seems small compared to maybe the knowledge workers that I know. But maybe the vast majority of these are not knowledge workers. 36% of respondents say they're actually more productive when working from home than when they were working in their office. Now, to me that feels low because I am very productive working at home. And I get so much less done when I could hear conversation around me in an office environment. 54% of senior leaders reported that their companies are implementing virtual events as a result of the outbreak. That even feel low to me. But hey, this is interesting. It's a poll 52% are doing more calls on phone or video that feels extremely low, especially when you look at Zoom's stock price. 26% of respondents report feeling no impact to their productivity at all. When you add those who report feeling no impacts their productivity, the 26% to the 36% of people who feel more productive, that makes 62%. So what that means is the 38% that are left are the people who feel like they're less productive working from home, which totally based off of your style, your preference, but that's pretty wild to understand as well. 45% say that this is somewhat or very likely going to become a more permanent shift. I've been thinking recently about those in commercial real estate and I'm thinking, wow, all these companies are figuring out how to get more and more of their people working from home, so they don't need larger spaces. And what are they going do with all of that space. So it will be interesting to see what that industry does. I won't be surprised if every company has some kind of a work from home policy. Okay, let's jump in and highlight a few reviews that you guys as listeners have left on the podcast pages. RyanRhoten says "Pure value. AJ is such a wealth of information on LinkedIn ads. This podcast is like using the Hogwarts pensive to glimpse into his brain and extract the exact information you need to grow your business through LinkedIn Ads. Thanks for sharing AJ, you are as generous as you are wise." Thanks so much, Ryan. So Ryan runs The BRAND New You Podcast and anyone who is into branding should definitely check that one out, The BRAND New You Podcast by Ryan Rhoten. Thanks so much for leaving such an awesome review. Okay, Cinthia M. P. calls it "Not your average marketing podcast. I just started listening to this podcast based on the recommendation from a friend and I'm incredibly impressed. Sometimes marketing podcasts can be pretty general with information that is somewhat actionable, or information you've heard 1,000 times already, but I found this podcast to be full of useful, very detailed and specific information. I had to stop the podcast a few times to take notes. I highly recommend listening. I'm excited to keep learning from the best in the world of LinkedIn advertising." Cinthia, I don't know if we've met before, but thank you so much. That means the world to me that you would say that. That's exactly how I create this podcast. I actually created in mind for my employees to help train them. And so it's really nice to hear someone saying that they're listening along, ready to take notes. So thanks, you're doing it right. The username Steve467774, totally machine generated, it says, "Informative and actionable. One of my favorite podcasts. AJ gets into the details of how to be successful with LinkedIn Ads, while keeping things easy to understand. And the best part, you can take immediate action on what you learn in nearly every episode. Keep it coming." Steve, I absolutely think that that's the case and I at least hope it is that every episode, you can take something away and go and make changes to your account right then to become more successful or more efficient. Everyone else listening, I want to feature you so go and leave a review on whatever podcast player you listen, and I'd love to feature you there. Okay, with that being said, let's hit it. 5:29 If you listened to Episode 14, that was all about low budget strategies, how to be as incredibly efficient as you can possibly be on the network. And I want you to understand, this is nearly exactly the opposite. This is all about how to get accelerated delivery. And we know that we're going to pay more for this accelerated delivery. But here all of the triggers, all of the levers, all of the knobs that you can pull in turn in order to get accelerated delivery. These are in no particular order, I really mixed them around because I didn't want this podcast to be totally lopsided where you only needed to listen to the first half. Because the last half, it got increasingly less relevant or less valuable. So we'll jump into one that I think is maybe a little bit obvious, but it's more valuable in this situation to target large audiences. Because remember, only a small percentage of visitors on LinkedIn will end up clicking on an ad. It's about 1% if you have really good ad copy, or if you're extremely lucky. So that means the larger the audience you have, the more opportunities you will have for impressions. And the more impressions you have, the more clicks that you'll get totally dependent on your click through rate. So you'll want to target these large audiences. Now consider either expanding your existing audience into new audiences, or maybe even try to reach your existing audience with new targeting. For instance, here If you are only targeting your audience with job title targeting, be aware that LinkedIn only understands about 30% of job titles out there. And so if you can go and reach that same audience through either job function and seniority, or skills and seniority, or groups and seniority, you now have access to significantly more people in your audience who should already still be a great fit for your product or service. And of course, it makes sense to target new audiences. If you know that, wow, only directors and above are a good fit for what we do, maybe consider adding managers in there as well. Considering that LinkedIn considers those who are managers as being people managers. So not just you have the job title of manager, they want to see that you have people underneath you that report to you. My next recommendation is called LAN, L-A-N, and it applies to sponsored content campaigns. And you'll see as you're going Down in the build process, the very first checkbox that you come across will say LinkedIn audience expansion. Don't worry, we'll get to that one in a minute. But the second checkbox will be LinkedIn Audience Network, which is like LinkedIn Display Network. If you've used the Google Display Network or Facebook's audience network. The difference here is that LinkedIn's LAN, their audience network is extremely high quality. Every one of these sites were handpicked by someone who was way way overpaid for doing this kind of job. But it's super important because so many advertisers on LinkedIn, super, super care about the sites that they're being associated with and how that reflects on their brand. LinkedIn hasn't announced before, which sites that LAAN actually has access to, and it's been really difficult. I've had conversations with those who are overland and so I know a few of these sites, but I've been under a nondisclosure agreement. So I couldn't share. So I was super excited when last week when LinkedIn made their announcement about engagement retargeting. They also mentioned an update to LAN. And they mentioned three places where these ads can show up. So Microsoft New, MSN.com, and the app Flipboard. Obviously, this is just a very small amount, I'm sure there are at least 1,000 of these sites who have all been hand picked to be high quality. What's so cool about being able to just enable LAN is one checkbox later, and you now have the opportunity to get maybe 25% more traffic from your same audience. You're not diluting the targeting, you're going after the same people you've been going after anyway. So lead quality is going to stay extremely high. The reason why you can capture 25% or maybe even more than that traffic is because LinkedIn is not really the site that people go and spend a whole lot of time on. So if LinkedIn understood who these people are when they're on other sites around the web, that is so good for us to be able to reach the exact audience in more places than just LinkedIn. And as a bonus here, when you turn on LAN, you will notice your overall cost per click goes down. And that's because your clicks on the audience network actually cost significantly less than they do on LinkedIn.com. So you'll get more traffic, it will cost less per, and your targeting stays the same. It's the same high quality, which is more than I can say for audience expansion. Still, we'll get to it. 10:37 So next we have your bidding strategy. Now first off, you need to understand the difference between your bid and your budget. Your bid is how aggressively you're telling LinkedIn I want traffic when people show up. Your budget, on the other hand, is a safety net that says once you've hit this, we remove you entirely from the auction from bidding. So first, what you want to do is get your budgets out of the way, because what you don't want to do is bid super aggressively on LinkedIn to get traffic, and then hit your budget halfway through the day, and then realize that man, I blew all of my budget on super expensive clicks. If I would have just bid less, I could have gotten clicks for cheaper and had it go all day long, maybe even gotten twice the traffic. If you've listened to me for long enough, you know that I'm not a fan of paying too much for clicks. So I always recommend bidding low. Under a high urgency circumstance, though you can't cheap out on your bids, you want to bid aggressively, giving you the maximum amount of impression share, which then turns into clicks at the rate of whatever your click through rate is. Now if you have time, I recommend first starting by bidding by cost per click, just because the risk is lower to you as an advertiser doing this because you're only going to pay whenever someone actually clicks to go to your landing page or clicks on your offer. And you can still bid aggressively on cost per click, but it's just that you're going to pay only for what you get. And I say if you have time, because a lot of times in high urgency circumstances, you don't really have time to go through and test different ad formats or test different bidding strategies. Because LinkedIn doesn't have hourly reporting, you have to go and really take a stab at something and hope that it's going to work as well as possible for you. So if you start bidding by cost per click, and you don't do well in the auction, you're not getting enough traffic. That's really unfortunate and you've lost some time. So that's a natural segue into the next one, which is all about CPM bidding. So as opposed to CPC or cost per click bidding when you're only paying because someone took action on your ads. The opposite end of the spectrum is CPM or cost per thousand impression bidding. And the way this works is it takes the risk and puts it all on you as an advertiser. Because if you have a bad ad that no one wants to click on, LinkedIn is gonna get paid no matter what, just for showing it. And you could get zero traffic to your website and still be paying and paying handsomely. The reason why it's attractive here, though, is CPM bidding, basically bypasses the whole auction. You don't need to worry too much about your relevancy score, how good your ads are, and LinkedIn size. Because since LinkedIn makes money every time they show your ad, it's low risk for them. So they don't really care to take that into account. They're just going to look and see what you're bidding and say, yeah, okay, we think that that would be more worthwhile to bank that cash rather than take a chance on serving against other advertisers who may only pay when their ads get clicked on. So this is riskier for you. But when you are bidding by CPM, LinkedIn will want to show your ad at every possible juncture. Every time that they get a chance they're going to show it, which is great for you if you're trying to get as many of these impressions in as possible in time for your event or the end of your budget. 14:10 Now, I've talked about CPM bidding. But it's really helpful to understand there's another option called auto bidding, that really is very much the same thing. All auto bidding is, is CPM bidding that you don't have to babysit as much. You don't choose a bid. It's kind of like handing LinkedIn, your wallet and saying here, take as much out as you think you need. But whatever objective you've told LinkedIn that you're trying to optimize towards, when you're doing auto bidding, it's going to optimize towards that paying CPM at the same time, CPM auto bidding, they are great if your ads are performing extremely high to the click through rate. 14:49 So this gives us a nice natural segue then into another lever you have which is just simply increasing your click through rate. I'll use sponsored content ads as an example here because they're really the standard. The average sponsored content ad gets clicked on about .4% of the time. So a little bit less than half a percent. What that means is there are a lot of people seeing your ads without actually clicking. So if you can increase your click through rates, even a small amount, it means you can get significantly more traffic. You don't need to make your audience bigger, you don't need to change your bidding at all. You can really just change your ad to something that people want to click on more often, and you can start enjoying getting significantly more traffic. On the other hand, when you're in a rush, launching new ad creatives is a significant risk. You'll have to launch and potentially see a four to eight to even 12 hour review period for your ads to go through review. And if you don't have something else running at that same time, that's scary because you're trying to accelerate delivery and at the same time your ads are offline for several hours. To mitigate this risk, I would consider going back through old successful, creative and trying to find something that used to work. And maybe it's even from different channels, maybe you're running the same kind of thing on Facebook, or Google and you can go and try to borrow whatever has been successful over there. And here's a neat little hack. If you're running sponsored content ads, there is going to be a frequency cap that is actually pretty stringent to you as an advertiser. The natural frequency cap, at least used to be members can see your ad once per day, per account. And the only way that we could actually get more delivery, we could show more often than that once per day once per 24 hours, was to put additional creatives in the same campaign. And thanks to a wonderful rep named Natalie Gubman, I recently got informed about how the frequency cap is working currently. And she says a member can see one unique creative from an advertiser determined at the company page level, so not account every 12 hours, they cannot see this one unique creative again, within that 12 hour period. However, a member can see five unique creatives from that advertiser, again determined at the company page level within the same 48 hour period. So what that means is, if you can put five unique creatives, five different ads into your campaign, you can essentially accelerate delivery to your most active LinkedIn users who are part of your audience. Now, you may not actually want to test five separate creative, maybe you're running an AB test, and you only want two different creative running. Well, what I would do LinkedIn doesn't know the difference between ads even if they look exactly the same. So if you're trying to run two ads against each other, just duplicate those two ads. LinkedIn thinks that these are two separate ads even though they say exactly the same thing. And then if you're trying to do this AB test where you're trying to split the traffic evenly, it'll be really easy to roll all of those results up and combine the metrics for the ads that were exactly the same. So you still get great split test data. And you got to take advantage of LinkedIn's increased frequency cap and getting the word out quicker. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into the ad formats that we're going to use for accelerated delivery. 18:27 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. 18:35 If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We manage LinkedIn's largest accounts, and we're the only media buying agency to be official LinkedIn partners and performance to your goals is our only priority. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to get in touch and we'd love to help you absolutely demolish your goals. 18:59 All right, let's see jump into the other ad types that will help you accelerate your spend. So the first ad type you'll want to concentrate on here is sponsored messaging. Now this is because most of the ad formats on LinkedIn are what I consider inbound. They're essentially putting a message out there and waiting for someone to come around from your audience to log in, see something and then click on it when they're interested. But with sponsored messaging that includes both message ads that used to be called sponsored in mail, and conversation ads, these are what I consider push marketing. They push directly into a member's messaging box while they're online. And they're a little bit exclusive, because each member can only receive one of these every 45 days. So while sponsored content, it's sitting in their newsfeed and if you're lucky, maybe 1% of people will end up clicking on it. These end up getting about a 50% open rate, which is definitely a minimal kind of reaction, but it is a reaction nonetheless. If you're trying to get the word out as fast as possible, having someone see an offer and then click to open it is definitely more than just watching it scroll by in their newsfeed. So again, if you're trying to get the word out fast, this is really the only ad format where you can kind of force someone to see something. I really love sponsored content as well, I don't think you should ignore that. But the next thing I want you to consider doing is stacking your ad formats. And that means using all of the different ad formats, all concurrently, because if your goal is to get in front of these people, no matter where they are, each ad format depending on where someone is on LinkedIn, and what device they're using, it means using a different ad format is much more likely to still engage one of these users, even if they were on their way to do something or we're going to be like a ship in the night passing by. The more ad formats someone sees you in, the more likely they are to click one of them. We've seen this when we do quarterly business reviews with our larger clients and LinkedIn comes to present. One of the things that they'll give us is a report, like a contribution report, of those members who saw more than one ad format, what the difference in their click through rate was versus someone who hadn't seen another ad. And we routinely see this number between about 13% and 30%. So someone is 13% to 30% more likely to click on your ads, if they've seen you in a different ad format before. So certainly, my recommendation is to use sponsored messaging first, then sponsored content, then text ads, and then dynamic ads. And I would do this all concurrently, all mimicking the same targeting. And this will envelop your ideal target audience in just a nice warm embrace a nice warm display ad hug. 22:00 The next tip I have for you is essentially a change in motivation. So there's this concept called FOMO, that many of you know, and it stands for the fear of missing out. This is such a strong motivation, a strong emotion that we as humans feel. We hate missing out. We hate knowing that there was a big party that happened last night that we could have gone to that all your friends were there, and you totally missed it. And you can use this motivation in your ad copy. Try ad copy, like don't miss it, put it on your calendar, only a few days left, limited seats remaining. Now, a note here on morals. So I'm not a fan of putting limited seats remaining. If there really are unlimited seats, you're just manufacturing fake urgency here. But if you do actually have a limited number of seats, then yes, say it. Let people know. You might miss this if you don't take action now. 22:56 Okay, this next recommendation I've been debating internally whether or not to share it with you. If you've been listening to me for long enough, you know how I feel about the audience expansion option. I hate it. I loathe it. I shudder every time I think about using audience expansion. I will say, though, as a very last resort, after you've done everything else, all my other advice here, and if you're still spending short of trajectory, it is one checkbox that you can check that will instantly give you access to a larger audience. So let's say LinkedIn, when you click that box inserts about 20% more people into your audience. LinkedIn is going to try to make sure that those are close to your ideal audience. And I think this is the only situation where I can see audience expansion making sense. Although I will say conclusively, I have never once seen a situation where I couldn't significantly speed up my spend using all of the other strategies here before I checked the audience expansion box. So I'd say maybe this is one in 100 chance that you'd even have to do this, but I have to say it. Okay, so now I'm gonna go take a shower after making that recommendation, because I feel real dirty. 24:11 The next one I've got for you is really just in case, you should ask yourself, Is this a brand new account? Is this an account that's been opened in the last few weeks that really hasn't had a significant amount of spend go through it? You should know that there is a glass ceiling on every new account to keep people from making giant mistakes. And what it does is it artificially limits your spend in that account to $100 per day. LinkedIn doesn't tell anyone about this. It's not written really anywhere, at least not that I've seen. And so what happens is, you'll be in this high urgency situation where you're trying to spend and the account will just stop at $100 for the day, and you'll be scratching your head going, I don't get it. My ads are active, my campaigns active I have plenty of budget. Why? Well, it's because of this invisible cap and your LinkedIn rep might not even know about it. So what you want to do is either file a ticket beforehand with LinkedIn help, or if you happen to have a LinkedIn rep, make sure you let them know to remove it significantly beforehand. So don't do this they have because sometimes it can take some time for them to respond. Ask several days in advance, hey, we want to spend a lot of money please remove this cap. Because nothing is more of a buzzkill than when you have $1,000 a day to spend and the account gets stuck at $100 and two cents. While everything's active. please learn from my mistakes. I've done this many a time and forgotten about this glass ceiling. There's also a setting that is actually kind of hidden and it's for good reason, we've talked about it before. And this is where you can rotate your creative evenly or optimize for click through rate. Now I want you to go and look and make sure if you have the option check to rotate evenly, change it. Get over to optimize for click through rate. The reason here is if you are rotating evenly, I call this the charge me more and show me less button. When you're in a high urgency situation, you do not want to be shown less. And my guess is you probably don't want to get charged more. So avoid that option, even if someone looked at it and thought, oh, this will help me do AB testing. It won't, it'll just charge you more and show you less. So in conclusion here, you're going to pay more for this accelerated delivery. So set that in your expectations, expect your efficiency metrics to take a hit, you are sacrificing your efficiency for speed of delivery here. Ayou won't have as much time to test things, so you'll really have to accept whatever performance your ads and offers get. So give yourself the best stab. Do as much testing as you think you can do without disrupting, but certainly put your best stuff on and keep it going. I'll also mention that it's much better to front load your ads. That means take all of these strategies into account and potentially spend more rapidly up front than you want. The reason is, if you have something like a webinar coming up, it's actually better the sooner people can get it on their calendar, just so they don't end up having something else like a conflict happen before they see your ads. So you'll want to front load there. But it's also just as important to understand that it's easier to slam on the brakes than it is to slam on the accelerator with ads. It takes much longer to find new ways, new audiences to spend more than it is to just simply bid something down, set a daily budget or pause the campaigns or ads entirely. When you are in high urgency, there is value in just being everywhere. Make sure you use all of the ad formats, make sure you expand your targeting where it makes sense. Okay, with that being said, I've got the episode resources coming up right after this so stick around. 28:06 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 28:16 Okay, hope you enjoyed that episode. I had a lot of fun recording it. I get a little bit passionate about this stuff as I'm sure you can tell. I'd love to share with you the resources we talked about earlier. But because one was a link to a protected deck, I can't share the stats with you here. So maybe just write them down or keep them in in memory. But check in the show notes. If you are new to LinkedIn ads if this is something that you are doing for your job, and you need to get up to speed quickly. The course that I built with LinkedIn Learning. The link is right there and you will love this course. It takes you from absolutely nothing all the way to yes, you can build and run your own campaigns and get started. It contains the same information that I teach in about my first hour and a half In person training, and I charge $500 an hour for that consultation and training. And the course itself is only $25. And it's even free if you have like a premium subscription to LinkedIn. So definitely take me up on that course it is well worth the investment. Both time and money. 29:18 Whatever podcast player you're on, please look down right now and hit the subscribe button. Because if this is good content for you, if this is gonna help you in your job, then I want you hearing more of it. And then please do rate and review in whatever podcast player you're listening on. I would love to feature your review here publicly for everyone. If you have ideas for the show, topics that you want covered questions, shoot them over to Podcast@B2Linked.com. And we love to take those into account and help prepare future episodes. We're always looking for great content. Okay, with that being said, I'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources: LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course LI Recommended Audience Sizes MS Quarterly Release Ep 287 of LinkedInformed Podcast Bidding Budgeting Episode Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Show Transcript: How big should your LinkedIn Ads audiences be? Hearing conflicting advice? Let's clear that up right now. 0:15 Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. here's your host, AJ Wilcox. 0:23 Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. There's a lot of conflicting advice out there about audience sizes for your LinkedIn ads. And I get questions about it all the time. So I figured we'd go ahead and clear that up. We've tested about every which way you can think and we've come up with our own strategy for what types of audience sizes work best. So let's definitely get into it. First off the news. This week, Microsoft had their quarterly earnings release. And this was super interesting to me. I actually heard about this from the LinkedInformed podcast by the great Mark Williams if you're not already subscribed to that podcast, it goes over the organic side of LinkedIn. And it's absolutely brilliant. In Episode 287, he goes over this in his new section. And even though LinkedIn isn't actually publishing these stats, Microsoft is. So Microsoft says that LinkedIn's revenue growth is up by 21%, which is fantastic. And they also mentioned something really cool and really key. Sessions are up 26%. Oh, I love this. These aren't stats that LinkedIn is sharing too often. But if Microsoft will share them, I'll take them. He also mentioned in this episode that an unnamed source, let this news outlet know that conversations on LinkedIn are up 55% in March, and comments in the newsfeed are up 272%. So similar to what we've talked about in previous weeks with cool COVID news happening. I know nothing's really cool about COVID, but there have been some cool things coming from it. I wanted to highlight a few of the reviews that you guys have left. Betsy Hindman in Nashville, who's a good friend Betsy, thanks so much for listening. She says "AJ is the real deal. Great podcast. Super guy. Very knowledgeable." Thanks so much for leaving that. Then Robinhfr from France says "really helpful. I love this content, so much value in this podcast". Robin thanks so much for leaving that it means the world to me. Maria Cole mentions "the most knowledgeable LinkedIn Ads experts out there. AJ knows more about LinkedIn than anybody I know. His podcast is full of amazing insights and knowledge. Often I find myself agreeing with him out loud while listening". Oh, I love this. I hope all of you are kind of nodding along if if we're striking a chord and touching on things that you found through experimentation, Oh, I love to be geeking out with you. Go to whatever podcast player you're on. And leave us a review. I would love to help feature you. Okay, with that being said, let's hit it. When I was very first getting started running my very first LinkedIn Ads back in 2011. I read the recommendation that LinkedIn recommended 300,000 in an audience. And this was back when the only ad format we had was text ads. And text ads, as you know, average somewhere around a .025%. click through rate, which is incredibly low. Then in 2014, LinkedIn came out with the sponsored content ad format. And I was absolutely certain that these recommendations were going to change because text ads had a .025%, click through rate and sponsored content had 12 times the engagement. But sure enough, for years and years afterward, I still see LinkedIn recommending 300,000 for an audience size. I definitely think that there was a good reason to have 300,000 as the audience size recommendation, but now that the ads can literally spend 12 times or more, I think there's a lot more opportunity to tighten up our audiences. So we'll go into how I use smaller audiences and why. But it's important to understand the history here. And then adding to that the minimum audience size on LinkedIn used to be 1000. But then back in 2017, in April 2017, LinkedIn came out with matched audiences the retargeting product. And at that point, the minimum audience shrunk from 1000 down to 300. And I'm so grateful, thank goodness this happened, because the tighter we can make our audiences the better. Now I checked out LinkedIn's Help section on this and link to that is in the show notes. They say for sponsored content and sponsored messaging, we suggest a minimum of 300,000 audience size. For text ads, we suggest that you target between 60,000 and 400,000. Okay, so that's LinkedIn's recommendations. For some reason text ads are recommended to be a smaller audience than sponsored content, something there I'm not understanding. My recommendations are if you're using sponsored content, try to stick between about 20,000 to 80,000. If you're using text ads, try 20,000 to 80,000. Hey, how about dynamic ads? 20,000 to 80,000. Oh, AJ, I understand where you're coming from. How about sponsored messaging? Oh, AJ, I understand where you're coming from, you're gonna tell us 20,000 to 80,000? No, I'm gonna change the script on you a little bit. For sponsored messaging. I love to start with ultra tight audiences because they are able to spend so much more. But when in doubt, stick between 20,000 to 80,000. And you'll be pretty safe. Okay, so why are our recommendations so different? Why would you listen to LinkedIn versus our advice? Are you getting such differing opinions? It's important to understand where LinkedIn's motivation is, because to LinkedIn, it is a significantly larger risk for a new advertiser or a less sophisticated one to come and test out the platform come and try things out. And then not spend any money and then leave and go tell their friends that the LinkedIn Ads Form didn't work, they didn't get any traffic. So they would much rather that you had a large audience size. So you were pretty much guaranteed to spend your whole budget. To me though I have a very different motivation here. To me, it's all about getting the best performance, the highest efficiency, and the best data out of an account. And so I use these tightly themed audiences. They act like little silent focus groups, which I'll tell you all about here in just a little bit. So certainly, if you don't have the expertise on the platform, and if you're listening to this, I'm guessing that's not you. But then you'll want to follow LinkedIn's advice for audience sizes. It's pretty much foolproof at getting you to spend your budget without expertise. You may not spend very efficiently, but certainly all of those dollars got allocated. If you do have the expertise and attention to manage smaller campaigns, then you will get so much more control and insights out of your account, and you'll get a tighter ability to optimize and find efficiencies. that you shouldn't, quote unquote be able to do realize that as we're talking about audience sizes here, audience sizes are totally subjective. I can't just tell you that an audience size of 30,000 is a good thing or a bad thing, because that's totally dependent on number one, how active that audience is on LinkedIn. And number two, how often people are clicking on your ads. Because if you had a minimum sized audience of 1000 people, but you have 100% click through rate, you could probably still spend a healthy budget. Of course, that's probably not going to happen, but you get my drift. Even a small audience that's very active, can spend more than a large audience that's largely inactive. There are certainly risks with both styles of campaigns here, you can have campaigns that are too small and there are definite risks there. And then you can have campaigns that are too large, and that has its own set of risks. So first of all, if your campaigns are too small, there's a really good chance that you won't spend enough, you don't have enough people in those audiences, and all else held equal, small audiences won't spend as much as large audiences. Maybe if you are dedicating the time to build these audiences, but they don't spend very much, maybe that wasn't worth your time, maybe you see that as a waste. And then maybe you've got these small audience sizes, which means you're not going to spend very much, which means you're not going to generate a large quantity of leads. So maybe you have internal pressure in the company that not only do you have to spend this budget, but you also have to hit a lead goal. And then finally, if data is accumulating slowly, it means that we can't make optimization decisions because we're dealing with these small data sample sizes. Well, hang on, because I've got a cool solution for you that I'll cover here in just a few minutes about rolling data. And all of these risks are totally mitigated by yes, we build small audiences, but we build lots of them. So together they act like large audiences. Separately, we still get data. So hang on, I'll break that one down. I know that gets a little bit ethereal. But what about having campaigns that are too large? If you're taking LinkedIn's recommendations, which we don't recommend, I think the risks are even higher. So number one, you can have too many different people in there. So I'll give you an example. Let's say you had a campaign where you had both finance and operations professionals in the same campaign. Well, let's say finance professionals do amazingly well. But operations folks are terrible. If you're looking at the results from that campaign, it might just look average, it might be okay. And you missed out on the fact that if you would have split those out into two separate audiences, you would have found that wow, finance professionals are killing it for us. So you're missing learnings about your audience, you're losing that ability to understand more about what they care about, and really who your ideal target audience really should be. Also, audience that are too large, they spend budget too fast. So if you have a small budget, let's say you're running something at the minimum of $10 per day per campaign, if you have a large audience, chances are you're going to blow all of your money in the middle of the night before your audience even gets into work. So really, it shouldn't be about what your budget is, on a per campaign basis, it should be finding the right budget per audience. And of course, listen back on episode six, where we go in deep on bidding and budgeting to find out more about that. Okay, I'm going to give you an example. And this is a real world example of the type of targeting that we would build. A client comes to us and they say, our target audience, our marketing decision makers, at companies with more than 500 employees. So I go and build this campaign in LinkedIn. And I see a target audience size of 360,000. And this is in the US. According to LinkedIn recommendations, yeah, an audience size of 360,000 is fantastic. But I looked at that and went, man, having everyone from manager all the way up to cmo represented in a single campaign. That doesn't tell me anything. So what I did is I broke that out into four separate campaigns. One that is marketing job function with manager seniority, at companies with more than 500 people, of course, I did the same thing, but instead of managers, it's directors. And then the same thing instead of directors, it's VPS. And then finally, I have one just for the the chief marketing officers. There are 160,000 managers, 160,000, directors, 58,000 VPS, and then only 26,000 CMOS. So breaking these into their own campaign, your LinkedIn rep will definitely tell you, ah, these audiences are too small. You should really make them larger. But what I've done is taken the same two ads and put them in all four of these different campaigns. And notice, I'm still targeting the same size of audience. It's still 360,000 total senior marketers, no one made it in that audience that wasn't supposed to be there that wouldn't have been there from the beginning, I'm still able to spend all of my budget. But now I actually have information, I have data about which levels of seniority, engage with my ads, and how and even how they convert. And I can keep following them all the way through the sales process, and learn more about what it takes to get a CMO to a sales qualified lead status, versus someone who's a, let's say, a marketing manager. Okay, we're gonna take a quick sponsor break and then we'll dive into the Goldilocks zone for audience sizes, and actually how to create them. 12:44 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. 12:53 If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We manage LinkedIn largest accounts, and are the only media buying agency to become official LinkedIn partners. And of course, performance to your goals is our only priority. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2linked.com to get in touch, and we'd absolutely love to help you demolish your goals. 13:17 Alright, let's jump into where the rubber actually hits the road with these tighter audiences. So we've talked about audiences that are too large, and some that are too small. Let's talk about the Goldilocks zone of those that are just right. And if you remember, last episode, we talked about the Goldilocks zone with spending enough on ad creative to get statistically significant data. The same principle applies here with the audiences as well. We're constantly looking for the right mix between learnings and spend. We want audiences that are small enough that you can actually still learn something valuable about what makes up that audience. And we also want them large enough that you can actually spend enough budget to tell and get any of these learnings. So let's say you have these large audiences and you want to break them up so you can learn more. So how should you break them up? Well, I want you to break them up by whatever you want to learn about my go to is to break them up by seniority, like that example I use with marketers, I broke them up manager, director, VP, and C level. And this is really good because it helps with content creation. If we're performing really poorly with the C suite, like with CMOS in this case, we can then go to the client and say, Hey, your content is not resonating with CMOS, you should change the content. Here's what they seem to like. That's data we can pass. You can also break up by geography, because we know that different cultures are going to respond differently. So for instance, I wouldn't want the US and Europe in the same campaign if I could help it. Of course, if campaigns are, if these two audiences are so small, and I have to combine them in order for them to run then sure, I'll do it. But I know that the cultures are different. And so I would much rather keep them separate and learn about those cultures. I really like to break them up by company sizes as well. Even if you know that any one company size 500 and above is a good fit for your product, even breaking them up by let's say 500 to 1000, and then 1000 to 5000. And then 5000 and above can be a great way of learning "do we work very well in mid market in enterprise in giant companies, even fortune 500" can be a cool way to do this. I also like to break up audiences by job function. Like that example I shared before with finance and operations in the same campaign, I would always want to keep them separate because they're going to care about vastly different things. In short, cut your audiences by whatever meaningful segments that you want to learn about. And these tend to be very broad things. I wouldn't cut my audience by let's say something like job titles or skills or other things that might be too narrow. I want these to be very broad categories. And then if you have a large audience size, don't just cut it for the sake of cutting it. Like, for instance, saying, hey, this audience is twice as large as it should be, I'm going to create two different segments, one targeting just male and one targeting just female. If that insight about how men and how women interact with your content and offers wouldn't actually be a meaningful insight to you, then don't do it. I've seen people break things up by interest, or by a college degree, or something else that they didn't really care about. They were just going for an arbitrary audience size. Yeah, don't do that. It's just not worth the effort. Okay, so here's the gold here, how do you make use of audiences that are micro segmented? Well, this is the B2Linked strategy. This is where I'm about to drop some real value bombs on you. If I take an audience of senior marketers. And I break them up into their levels of seniority and timezone. So we're talking some altra tiny audiences here. If I do that each single campaign may be getting results really slowly, it might be spending $5, $10, $15, $20 a day or something like that. If I'm looking at these individual campaigns, I'm probably going to get impatient. Or I might not be able to make optimizations because these data sample sizes are too small. Ah, but here's what I can do. I can start rolling these campaigns, their performance together with other like campaigns and start to learn things about it. With a single pivot table in Excel. I now have enough data for understanding performance by timezone and I also have an understanding of performance by level of seniority. So each individual audience Yeah, it's too small to care about, but when I roll them up to all other campaigns with a similar trait, and I compare These things in aggregate, now I actually get some really valuable information and insights. We recently did this with a client where we've got about 200 campaigns in this account. And they are defined by targeting type, seniority, geography, and company size. Now, granted, they're a large spender, but I was able to build a model that shows what our cost per sales qualified lead is by each type of targeting by each level of seniority, by their geography, by company size. Do you know how valuable that is? As the account scales up, we know exactly which campaigns to bid up and get aggressive with, to maintain extreme account efficiency as we go up. I'm sure many of you know that you really get a choice between scale and efficiency. If you're going to scale up, you're going to lose efficiency along the way. Well, we've got a great way and how we don't actually lose efficiency as we scale and that is because As of this, this microsegmentation, giving us tight controls over every little aspect of an account. And conversely, if the client came to us and said, we have to cut budget, we know exactly which campaigns to cut out first. Maybe they're okay. They're not total losers. But if I have to cut budget, I'm going to cut the worst performers first, for sure. And that means as we scale back, we actually get also more efficient. So many of you may be listening and going, Oh, man, it feels like a lot of work to manage an account with 200 campaigns. Is it worth it? Absolutely it is. If I managing an account with 200 campaigns, versus what it might be at maybe 20, otherwise. The level of control that I have over efficiency, as well as the learnings and insights I can get about every variation of their target audience. I absolutely guarantee that that is worth the extra time you have to spend creating ads, and I also guarantee your competitors aren't going through this much trouble. for managing the account, you will get a leg up on them. Okay, so should you force audience sizes? No. If the audience is larger than my 20,000 to 80,000 recommendation, but there just isn't an intelligent way to slice it. Leave it alone. Don't just aim for arbitrary audience sizes. There are some benefits to larger audience sizes, like you can actually get lower cost per click sometimes, because you have a higher probability of being able to bid the absolute minimum or lower and still spend your budget. And conversely, if your audience is smaller than our recommendation, should you add irrelevant people to the audience to make it larger just to fit this mold? No, absolutely not. LinkedIn is way too expensive of a channel to ever spend a dime on someone who isn't your ideal, perfect audience. What about if it's too small? Should you just not run the campaign? Is it not worth your time? Well, ultimately, I'm going to leave that up to you. I still think it's valuable. If you have an audience size of 300 people who are Perfect for what you do. Yeah, sure that campaign may never really spend a lot of money. But boy, any money that that does spend, or any lead that it generates will be well well worth your time. So ultimately your audience sizes will have to be what makes sense for you. Don't let someone else tell you what size your campaigns need to be, especially if what you're doing is working. But hopefully that at least provides a guide for you. Okay, I've got episode resources coming up for you right after the break. So stick around. 21:35 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 21:43 Okay, here in the show notes, check out the LinkedIn recommended audience sizes in their help section I've linked right to it. You can at least see what they recommend and why. And in the new section I told you about Microsoft's quarterly update report. The links there, go ahead and check that out. See what Microsoft says. about LinkedIn performance. Also, I mentioned Mark Williams, the LinkedInformed podcast, there's a link there to his Episode 287, where you can hear his commentary on it as well. If you're just getting started in LinkedIn Ads, check out the course that I did with LinkedIn Learning. It's only $25 if you're not a premium subscriber to LinkedIn, and free if you are, and it covers the same stuff that in a one on one training, I would be charging $500 an hour for. This could be also really good. If you're trying to train coworkers or new recruits in on LinkedIn Ads to help support you then check out this course it's fantastic. Whatever podcast player you're on, look down right now and make sure that you are subscribed. And then please review the podcast I would absolutely love to share your review with everyone and give you a shout out. Any ideas for the show any thing you'd like us to cover, reach out at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources: LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course COVID-19 insights and resources for advertisers The digital advertiser’s guide to COVID-19 Bidding Budgeting Episode Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Show Transcript: How much money should you budget for your LinkedIn ads? We'll break it down cleanly so you know exactly how much to dedicate. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. 0:20 Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics, I get asked a lot about how much advertisers need to budget for their LinkedIn Ads. It's usually prefaced by, "Hey, I know you're gonna say it depends, but I'm gonna ask anyway". Well, the truth is, I love this question, because I actually have a straightforward answer to it. And I'm eager to teach you all about it. We'll be covering in this episode, specifically, how much on average you'll need to spend to get the results you're looking for, as well as how long you'll need to actually spend this budget over. Okay, jumping into the news. Last week, I gave you some really cool stats about what's changing from LinkedIn's perspective during this whole COVID situation. And I was going through that material trying to find some new insight. And what I found was LinkedIn gave me access to something that Microsoft put out, which was their resource for COVID-19 insights and resources for advertisers. So I decided to take a peek through there and see if there was anything of value. What I found was a document entitled The Digital Advertisers Guide to COVID-19. And I got really excited. This is right up my alley. And so I started reading and what occurred to me is that it definitely came from Microsoft. It said exactly what you expect it to say, from a company who makes a lot of money from paid search. They talk about how paid search is the most profitable channel, blahdy, blahdy, blah. And while I do agree that capturing the bottom of the funnel through search intent is extremely valuable. As you'll know if you listen to episode nine of this podcast about Google versus LinkedIn. I would say though, that during the whole COVID panic, there's been panic that has caused budgets to get pulled back. And so while people are still exploring purchase decisions, there is some reticence or some hesitancy to sign contracts right now. So search channels that are bringing people in right now who you're assuming are ready to buy is probably going to result in a high cost per opportunity or a high cost per closed deal. And as you know from Episode 19 search tends to bring in lower quality leads for a product or service that tends to be high cost. You'll get a lot of people acting like tire kickers and mom and pops who can't afford you. So even though Microsoft published this, and probably a lot of it is accurate during a non-COVID time. I personally think that LinkedIn is the channel that you want to invest in now to fill your sales pipeline amidst the current uncertainty. Now is the right time to be starting those relationships that weren't going to close for 3, 6, 9 months anyway. And you're filling them with exactly the right people who are going to be able to buy Okay, as a quick review, highlight, I wanted to highlight the next three reviews here that were left on the podcast. just.zee from Spain said "This one is a must. I'm truly enjoying listening to this show. Each episode is packed with tips. No BS pure gold." Thank you so much just.zee, that's exactly what we're aiming for here. Then a Mr. Bradshaw from the US says "soothing voice, better than calm. AJ's voice is buttery smooth. I used to pay for a subscription to calm but now I listened to AJ as his voice is sooth me into deep, deep sleep." John Bradshaw is actually a good friend of mine who left that as a joke. So John, I'm still shouting you out. But you know, I've listened to my voice. I know it's not buttery smooth. So I hope I'm not breaking your senses of pitch or good vocal practices. Then Sam McRoberts of the US says "AJ is a LinkedIn Ads wizard. This podcast is chock full of LinkedIn advertising wisdom from a guy who knows more about the platform than any other advertiser. Hands down, highly recommended." Sam is a another friend of mine. And he actually runs his own podcast and he's one of the worldwide SEO experts that I learned from. So Sam, thanks so much for leaving the review. Your review means so much to me, because I know your status in the industry as an SEO Pro. And I would love to feature you in this section, feel free and please go and leave a review so I can shout you out. And with that being said, let's hit it. 4:29 Now when we talk about budgeting, there are two different kinds of budgeting that that might bring to mind. There's the kind that's like, over a specific amount of time, this is how much budget you have to allocate to a channel. And then you have the daily budgets, like the platform you might enter in and how much you are only going to allow the platform to spend per day. If you're hoping to learn what you should be spending per day, we covered that pretty well in Episode Six, the bidding and budgeting section. So we're not going to be covering that here. Instead We're going to be talking about how much money you need to dedicate on usually a monthly basis. But some people plan their their budgets by quarter or maybe even by two weeks sprint, by year, etc. And for most performance advertisers we are interested in how much do we have to spend on a platform to really invest and learn something and evaluate whether the platform should receive more of our future budget or not. But at the same time, not spending so much that we're spending inefficiently. So there's a little bit of a range here, and I like to call it the Goldilocks zone, spending enough to learn and test and optimize properly, but don't spend too much that you wasted money. You want to spend just enough right in the middle of that Goldilocks zone. And of course many of you know the fairy tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears where Goldilocks comes in and finds that the Papas porridge is too hot. The baby's porridge is too cold and the mother's is just right in the middle. So that's where we want to be with advertising. And we are going to talk specifically about amounts that you should spend based on averages. And of course, this means you'll want to spend thoughtfully and with an efficient strategy, which is why even advanced PPC pros end up hiring us. I mean, anyone can do this themselves. But there's a lot of value in bringing on someone who can cut past that learning curve and ensure that every dollar is spent properly. So any spend spent on inefficiencies is wasted and it won't teach you anything. I'm going to mention statistical significance quite a bit through here. And I really just want to spend a moment and define why it is and what it means. So statistical significance in advertising to me is looking at results and being able to trust the outcomes as being something that I can predict to continue happening in the future. And there are lots of different percentages of statistical significance. In digital marketing. I've been taught to hold everything to a 95% confidence interval. But it's important to know that if you're only being held to a 90%, or maybe an 82%, or something like that, that's okay. That just means that your numbers will all shift lower. And you may be able to make decisions a little bit faster than what I suggest. I also want to mention something about outliers, because there are some outliers with extreme performance that you can spot very quickly. And so when you've spent $200 at the very beginning of your platform spend, and you have a ton of opt ins and conversions. That's an outlier. That's a really good thing. But it also means that you don't necessarily have to spend what I'm telling you to spend to finish evaluating the platform. You struck gold already. And then conversely, if you've spent $1,000, and you don't have a single opt in yet, you don't have to continue spending more and more and more to try to get statistical significance, because your performance is so poor that chances are even if your performance did increase significantly, you would probably still be paying too much per opt in. But most of your tests are going to land in between somewhere not an outlier. Even if performance looks a little bit good or a little bit poor, you'll need a lot more data gathering. So if something is very wrong or very right, you can get your answer a lot more quickly than here. And you probably don't need to wait for significance. Or maybe you could test it, you already have significance, especially if performance is great. Everything here I'm going to be sharing with you is based on benchmarks. So if you haven't listened to Episode 15, all about benchmarking, you'll want to make sure you go and do that. And the reason why is everything here is based off of averages. And so if you're paying more than the baseline, $8 to $11 per click, it means you'll have to spend significantly more to get the same level of data that I'm talking about. And of course, if you're paying less per click because of advantages that you learned from episode six of this podcast or maybe your advertising in a location like outside of North America, or in different languages where LinkedIn charges significantly less, then that means that you can spend significantly less budget to still reach the same levels. Also, if you are pushing people towards a high friction offer, like talk to my sales team, get a demo, buy something, you'll need to spend much more than what I recommend to get statistical significance because you need a large volume of conversions coming in. And when you have an offer that has a low conversion rate, then of course, you'll need a lot more of them. Conversely, if you have a conversion rate that's significantly higher than 15%, then you'll reach significance much faster and you can also spend less to hit the same level of significance. And then finally, if your sales team isn't as buttoned up, or your nurture sales process isn't as efficient, you will need to spend more because you won't have as many Sales qualified leads or proposals or closes the steps deeper in your sales process to figure out how you're going to get to a return on your investment. 10:10 Okay, so let's jump into what spending on LinkedIn actually gets you. Because here's where I get to get really concrete with numbers, and why I love the question about how much should you budget for LinkedIn. And of course, there are a lot of nuances like you've already heard before. And of course, we'll say a lot of ways that it depends, but we'll get to all of those shortly. And let's get into the concrete numbers here. Okay, so if your goal is to get statistical significance around your click through rates, you can usually get that in North America across all of my benchmarks with about $1,000 in ad spend. What you'll learn here is you'll figure out which messaging or motivation gets people to take action, it gets them to click. And so let's say your ad copy. You have one version that is aspirational. It makes people feel like the Hiro, and another one that's fear based telling them that if they don't use your product or service that something bad's going to happen, they'll lose their job, or they'll look dumb in a board meeting. Within about $1,000 in ad spend, you'll find out how your precise audience relates to those motivations. And this can be really helpful if you're just testing. What does my ideal audience like? What are they willing to click on? What are they curious about. Then yeah, you really don't have to spend that much. 1,000 total dollars gets you that. And then, of course, depending on what kind of offer and how you're bidding, it will likely get you some leads along the way as well. But I wouldn't worry too much about leads at this low spend stage. Now we get to what I really recommend for a new advertiser coming into the platform, I recommend spending $5,000. What this is going to get you is statistical significance around your conversion rates, as long as you're starting with assets that convert between about 10 to 15%, which is actually average for gated content offers. What $5,000 in ad spend is going to get you on average is somewhere between about 45 to 93 opt ins. Now, if you are splitting this between either two separate offers, or maybe it's the same offer, but you have two different motivations on ad copy, what you will likely get is 95% statistical significance on which of these offers or which of these ads converts better. You'll also get enough leads to actually see the impact on the business. This isn't two or three, onesy, twosies coming through. This is enough leads that you can actually look at and evaluate at some scale. And of course, a certain percentage of those are going to turn into marketing qualified leads or sales qualified leads, which will start to give you an idea of how these leads are quality wise and how they're going to start moving through the funnel. And when you go and talk to your sales team or you talk to the owner, you'll see that you're getting enough leads to actually get anecdotal Feedback from those teams or from the owner on lead quality. It's not all just about the actual numbers. It's about the perception of them by the sales team as well. You need their buy in to realize, yes, LinkedIn ads are amazing. And we should continue to fund this. Because most of the business to business that we run on LinkedIn Ads has longer sales cycles. Statistically, you won't have a closed deal in your first month. But you will statistically end up closing at least one of the leads you generated during month one. But just realize, you know, these long sales cycles, if it usually takes you 6, 8, 12, 15 months to close a deal, you can't expect LinkedIn to be magical and close deals faster than they usually close. In fact, it's a social platform, meaning that they weren't already at the bottom of the funnel. So the sales cycle traditionally takes a little bit longer. So give yourself a little bit of space and set those expectations properly internally, so that no one's expecting LinkedIn ads to be turn it on. Get instant ROI. And be a silver bullet. Okay, so what if you're saying, Oh, AJ, you're talking about 1000 $5,000 budgets, those are tiny, we have a much larger budget to work with. Well, this is fantastic because what you'll get is a statistically significant test every $5,000 in spend that you do. And it means that you can test much faster, you can run multiple tests at a time, you can actually run tests over a 2, 3, 4 day period. And keep seasonality, keep your timeline really tight, so that seasonality can't creep in and ruin or spoil some of your results. So use that as an opportunity to test more, test faster. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll get to dive into the timeframe over which you actually spend this budget. 14:47 The LinkedIn Ads show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. 14:56 If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with, we manage LinkedIn's largest accounts. We're the only media buying agency to be official LinkedIn partners, and performance to your goals is our only priority. So fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to get in touch, and we'd love to help you absolutely demolish your goals. 15:19 Okay, let's jump into timeframes here. So what I have been talking about here in the past is spending $1,000 to get significance around conversion rates and cost per conversion. But you might be asking yourself, Well, maybe I don't have that level of spend on a monthly basis. How long do I have to actually spend? Now, I do recommend this on a monthly basis for a lot of different reasons. But it's important to understand that when we're looking at statistical significance, we're looking only for a collection, a pool of data. We're not taking into account necessarily timeline. So if you are patient, if you have executive buy in to run that $5,000 budget Over the course of five months, feel free. But my warning to you is that when we've worked with clients doing this, even when they say they get executive buy in, inevitably, someone will get impatient. Your boss will come to you, the business owner will come asking during month one and say, "hey, how is LinkedIn ads looking?" And of course, the proper answer is quit asking you moron. This is we need a lot more data here before we actually call it. But some people tend to let their their pride their ego and shoot from the hip a little bit. And a lot of times, they'll come and say, well, it doesn't look like it's working. Let's cut budget and push it to somewhere else. So if you can speed it up, if you can even save your monthly budget up until you have a, let's say $5,000 for a month. What it's going to do is allow you to avoid those seasonality sways and not allow anyone to get impatient. All right. So let me give you an example here on seasonality sways. If you are spending over For a five month period for a test, and you happen to go over the month of December, which for B2B is terrible, or maybe you're going over the summer. The summer usually has a pretty significant lull. Or what if you were advertising from February on. And it just so happened that your tests landed in the middle of the COVID panic, these are all things that would really significantly sway your data and make it so your data is going to be a little bit messier, or you may not be able to rely on it. So if you can force all of this into a single month, do it. And what I also like about this is that you'll be getting statistical significance monthly. So that means a new test every single month, so that you're learning. And of course, if you do this for one month, and you get enough data to say that, wow, LinkedIn ads is not working well, for us. It's a poor performer. If I'm paying an agency to manage it, I would sure love to know by the end of month one, but the channel isn't for me. So I can quit and not pay another month of management fee just to draw that out. Now, we've worked with a lot of different advertisers. And of course, they are all over the board, all different offers all different industries, all different sales cycles, and all different lifetime values. But what we find is, on average, our clients are spending between about $1,000 to $4,000 in ad spend to close a deal. And of course, it does take testing and optimization to get to that point. So maybe starting out, they were trending for 2, 3 times higher than that. So that's why I told you in Episode One, that I recommend LinkedIn Ads only for those with a high lifetime value for prospecting a new customer. But once you've optimized a little bit. Once you've found the formula that works and we'll talk about ammo alignment here in just a minute. Once you've found that formula, you'll really start to feel like your LinkedIn Ads are working for you not working against you. Because we work with so many different accounts and we work when we find what the averages are. I'm very sensitive to when, quote unquote growth hackers come in and talk about, hey, on LinkedIn ads, I put 30 cents into it, and I generated millions of dollars in revenue. So while yes, maybe they are telling you the truth, maybe they're not just blowing smoke, I want to suggest that you don't expect the same outcome for you. Be realistic. And that's why I've given you the benchmarking episode. So you can approach this thoughtfully and not just expect that tomorrow, you're going to close a multi million dollar deal. There certainly is a level of serendipity and luck associated with advertising on any channel, really. You may accidentally get lucky on your very first ad launch and get 7% click through rates on your first ad, and it got you cost per click under 50 cents. We've had several clients do this. And then conversely, you are statistically just as likely to totally bomb and do really poorly. So you do want to set proper action. Don't set the expectation that it's going to be like the growth hackers talk about how someone found a hack somewhere and you can replicate exactly the same thing. The rules to LinkedIn ads are exactly the same as every other social platform, you need to get alignment in your AMO. That is my acronym for the three things that you need for a successful social campaign. This is AMO, it stands for your audience, your message and your offer. Episode 14 goes more into depth on ammo alignment. But here's the basics. Your audience is who it is you're targeting. So you start by going for the very most core of people who are feeling the pain that your product or service solves. The error message is how people actually see your ad. What's the ad format? Which imagery are you using? What ad copy are you using to try to motivate them to get interested? And then O is your offer. This is what you're actually asking people to do, your call to action A lot of times this will be a piece of gated content on LinkedIn. And so what we're really testing for in the early stages of testing LinkedIn as a platform, we're trying to find where your audience, your message and your offer are aligned. Because when they are in alignment, you'll see crazy results. And LinkedIn becomes something that is predictable. It's a lead generation machine. And when you're not in alignment, it feels like you're pulling teeth to try to make the platform work. It feels difficult to get LinkedIn to give you traffic, or you just have to spend money endlessly to try to coerce people into converting. So I've shared a few warnings here before, but I want to just re emphasize this, because I want everyone listening to this podcast to look extremely successful and look like the heroes in your either agencies or in house role. So first off, don't spend a few hundred dollars and then make a determination on the channel. Because the real value of LinkedIn is not in the cost per click. If you're trying to get the lowest cost per lead, go to Facebook, if you're measuring your channels just on cost per lead, or just on cost per opt in, LinkedIn will always look extremely expensive. But the real value in LinkedIn is the targeting to make sure you're hitting exactly the right people who are likely and able to purchase from you. So the real value is tracking all the way down to the cost per sales qualified lead or some kind of qualified stage. Because when you're tracking all the way to cost per sales, qualified lead, that's when LinkedIn starts looking really good compared to other platforms, Facebook and Google included. So be realistic until you've spent thousands of dollars you likely won't have enough data to make the call about conversions unless you have a runaway success with 65% conversion rates, which we've seen before, but certainly not often. Another word of warning here is don't cheap out on the platform. If you stand to make $50,000 off of a closed deal, don't approach it. LinkedIn with a few hundred dollars, and then assume it's not a good channel when it didn't make you money. Realize that a deal that is worth $50,000 over the lifetime is a much higher consideration type of offer. And it's going to take more time. And it's going to take more deliberation on your clients perspective to decide to close that deal. So the higher your lifetime value, the more you will have to invest in LinkedIn ads to make it work. So if you're doing what I recommend, and you're budgeting $5,000 a month for LinkedIn ads, and you're seeing a lot of opt ins come in and then quite a few of those turn into marketing qualified leads, and then maybe 20%, 30% of those turning into sales qualified leads. If you see this progression, you won't need a close deal to tell you that this is a good channel, you'll see the data accumulating and starting to graduate through the stages and that will tell you that yes, even though I'm not closing deals right now even though we are not revenue net positive here. We feel comfortable continuing to invest in LinkedIn Ads. It's producing, it's likely to be a good channel for us. If you are extremely limited on budget, let's say you have a very small budget that you have to spend over a long period of time, and you want to maximize that. Make sure to listen to Episode 14 of this podcast because we go specifically into small budget strategies on how to make sure every dollar is spent efficiently so that you get the best chance of success on the platform. Okay, I've got the episode resources coming right up. So stick around. 24:38 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 24:46 Okay, those resources I talked about in the news. Microsoft has their COVID-19 insights and resources for advertisers. It's broken down actually by industry. So depending on what industry you are, you can go and look and see what But some of the effects that they've measured are. And do keep in mind that the majority of their insights come from a search perspective, so they may not be as valuable to you as a social marketer. But I know many of us here in social marketing came from a search background. And so it might still be interesting to peruse, over. And of course, the digital advertisers guide to COVID-19, the ebook, I've linked to that here in the show notes below. So check that out. And of course, if you are new to LinkedIn advertising, the best course I have for you is the LinkedIn Learning course on LinkedIn Advertising, I happen to be the author, so I've put the link to the course down here below. But what I want you to understand is right around an hour, this course teaches you what I would teach you if I were doing a one to one training over the course of about an hour and a half. And in person, I'm charging $500 an hour, the course only charges $25 for the whole course. Or if you're a LinkedIn premium member, it's free to watch those. So Highly recommend, check out that course. And please, whatever podcast player you're on, do subscribe to this podcast. If LinkedIn Ads is important to you as a channel in your digital marketing, then I want you to have every leg up possible. So do subscribe, make sure you catch all of our future episodes. And please do rate and review the podcast I would especially love to see your reviews and I don't mind if they're critical, feel free to write it down on me. I want to improve this podcast. So if you have any ways to to improve, maybe still leave a top notch review, but reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with any critical feedback, anything you'd recommend, anything you'd like to see or hear. Okay, I'll see you back here next week. I'm cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show resources: LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course UTM parameters Bidding Budgeting Episode Account Organization Episode Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Transcript: The top five worst mistakes you can make on your LinkedIn Ads. Are you making any of them? Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. 0:18 Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics, I frequently get to audit LinkedIn Ads accounts. And I've got a checklist of things I'm looking for specifically, I wanted to share these account mistakes with you in case there were any of them that you were making, so that you can get them fixed. Or if you're evaluating an agency, you'll know which questions to ask to ensure they know what they're doing. In LinkedIn Ads News, we noticed last week that you no longer have to hover over a campaign and click manage to get to the settings. You now just hit the three dots next to the campaign name and click manage from there. So I'm still not a huge fan of the the user interface here and how it's complex about whether you click on the campaign name or you click on manage. But hey, I'll take this over having to hover any day. In other news COVID-19 is still a thing. So LinkedIn is experiencing some really interesting platform growth specifically because of all that time that people are spending at home while they're working. And I've got some cool stats to share with you. So first of them is that there has been a 55% increase in interaction in the newsfeed so that means responding, reacting, commenting, I don't think this includes reading, but either way, this is really cool to see 55% more activity in the newsfeed because of course, that opens up inventory for us to use for sponsored content. There's been a 60% increase in people posting in the newsfeed so that 60% more content there. And 40% more time has been spent reading in the news section. So these all point to the fact that people are spending more time on LinkedIn. And I think that that's a great thing for all of us who are using the ads platform. The LinkedIn learning platform has reported that consumption is up 3x from February and 2x for March. And so what that tells me is, as people are getting more and more used to staying at home working from home, they're investing their time, probably less in Netflix, binge eating, and more in LinkedIn learning, consumption, and probably all kinds of different learning to this is just the one place that we have data from. So good job to all of you out there who are using this time to better yourselves and make yourself a better professional. I wanted to highlight a few reviews that had come in over iTunes here. MaggusK from Germany says "Great stuff. Thanks, AJ. It's really good to hear some tips, hacks, and hints from a LinkedIn campaign professional. Looking forward to the next episodes." Thank you, MaggusK. John from Sweden says great podcast for marketing professionals. This podcast gives you great insights on how to master LinkedIn Ads like a pro. Thanks, John, appreciate that. And finally, just.zee from Spain says "this one is a must. I'm truly enjoying listening to this show. Each episode is packed with tips, no BS, pure gold." Oh man, that just warms my heart. Thank you so much, just.zee. And of course, I want to feature your review too. So any of you out there listening, please leave me a review. We'd love to highlight it on the show and give you a little bit of a shout out. Okay, with all that being said, let's hit it. Here are the top five mistakes that we find people making in their LinkedIn Ads accounts. And again, I want to make sure that you're not making them in your account. Or if you have an agency managing your account, check that they're not making them either. 3:49 Mistake #1 is naming campaigns after the asset or after some arbitrary date range. Anytime I'm going through an account and I see campaigns called 2020 webinar or water guide, I die a little bit inside. And the reason why is because this signals to me that the account isn't producing the learnings that it should be. When you name your campaigns after the audience, what you get is this ability to break down all of the performance in your account by who. Who you're targeting, who is responding to your ads, and how. I've mentioned before that it's kind of like a silent focus group happening in your account all the time. By breaking up your audience into these micro segments of how people are grouped. All of the performance, the click through rate differences, the cost per click differences, the conversion rate differences, all of these things tell you who your ideal audience is and who they are not. And so when you name your campaign after the asset, the only thing you can actually learn about is which asset is performing and you'd be able to find that out quickly anyway, if campaigns are named after the asset that's being advertised, it also signals to me that targeting is likely all over the board. And it's unsystematic, meaning that you're probably missing out on all kinds of opportunities. You might not realize that if you targeted by, let's say, job function and seniority, that you could actually get your cost per lead significantly lower. Or if you were targeting by groups, plus seniority, maybe you could get a much lower cost per conversion. These are all insights that you won't get if you just spray and pray with your targeting. 5:41 It's also really hard to report on an account when everything is named after the asset because there are so many things under the surface that aren't visible at a quick glance, and it would require a really deep level audit to surface all of these findings. You'll know if you're running one of these accounts, When your boss asks you for a quick report, a chill goes down your spine, and you get really worried that this is going to take you hours. When an account is structured properly, reporting takes minutes, it's so easy to break down performance by your ad type, by your individual audience, by your objective, by the content by each ad, all of these things are just a click away. Also, if your account organization is off, you're probably paying too much for clicks, especially at the start of a campaign. And the reason why is every new campaign that you create, LinkedIn has to wonder how it's going to perform. And so it's going to award it a relevancy score of some sort, which probably isn't going to be very favorable. That means if your ads are amazing, because you're listening to this podcast so of course they're going to be, it's going to take a little while of LinkedIn charging you more per click than it should before you get the relevancy score you deserve and LinkedIn starts charging you what it should. If you create a new campaign every single time, you have a new asset that comes out, that means you're throwing out the old one. It's now garbage. LinkedIn can't rely on the strength of its past history to award you a strong relevancy score. That means all of the money that you've invested into these campaigns, it's just going to waste and you're also likely cannibalizing some of that same audience for multiple campaigns. Because if you're not being explicit about who your audience is in the campaign name, then it's very likely that you have other campaigns that are targeting the same audience. And when you have other campaigns, also targeting your same audience, you're not bidding yourself up in terms of competition. It's not costing you more, but you are competing against yourself. Each of those campaigns are for inventory, and it makes it really difficult to pace your spend and control your spend to these different assets. So what does it look like if someone is making this mistake? Well, first, the account is going to be really hard to look at, to understand and to manage, every little thing you have to do in the account is going to take too long. You're also not able to learn as much about your audiences. You're paying LinkedIn, the same dollars, but you're not getting the audience insights. You might as well get those along with the leads. And finally, you're probably paying too much for your clicks. So if costs look high, or efficiency looks low, this might be a clue that this is something that's happening. So go ahead and make your life easier and name your campaigns properly. So how should you name your campaigns? Well check out Episode 7 about account organization where we walk really deep into that. Your campaign names should include a systematic description of the audience, that you're targeting. And it's also great to include here your the ad format that you're using and the objective. It makes it so easy to segment and organize your account, especially if you're running different ad formats and objectives. 9:15 Okay, on to mistake #2. Mistake #2 is using audience expansion. Anytime I see the option of audience expansion turned on in a campaign, I know immediately someone didn't know what they were doing. It's a default value, but it provides no value. In fact, it's the opposite. it detracts from the value of advertising. Most of the options in the platform that I don't think are very useful, have occasional times where they can be valuable or used as a workaround or hack, but not this one, it's literally carte blanche for LinkedIn to muddy up your audience. And I can't think of a single situation where it would be smart to use audience expansion I've had a couple conversations with the product manager at LinkedIn who's over this feature. And they say that it's so valuable that it should be used on 95% of accounts. And that's why it set as the default value. I say it should be used on zero percent of accounts. And so because of that, we're pretty far apart on where we stand. So I don't know if we're going to find any common ground anytime soon. So what is audience expansion? Well, it's an option that when ticked, LinkedIn looks at your target audience and applies a look alike model to them, and then targets other people let other people into your target audience who they think are close to who it is that you're targeting. Here's the thing though, if you can spend all of your budget on your explicit ideal target audience, then why wouldn't you? Why would you ever want to leave anything to chance and let LinkedIn take a guess at Who else would be good to include in this audience? It's just not good practice. Now this isn't to say that the algorithm that it uses isn't good, it's actually pretty great. It's the same algorithm that you've used if you've ever created a look alike audience on LinkedIn, which I love to do. The problem with using audience expansion on your campaigns is that it's all intermixed with your existing audience, and you can't separate out the performance. So if I had a separate row in reporting of how performance was in my expanded audience, versus my original explicit audience, I would probably make a case for it. I'd go even further, if we could customize the URL tracking parameters that were clicked when someone was served an expanded audience add versus the original, then I could track all of that performance all the way down the sales process. And if I could do that, if I had visibility, I'd probably use it 95% of the time. Unfortunately, we don't have that level of visibility. Though, and so this option just muddies your results on who you're targeting. And from past testing with that I did when it was new, it ended up being a drag on performance. Even without the extra visibility, I would probably just cut it. Now, if you have audience expansion turned on, what you're likely seeing are poor lead quality. So maybe sales is letting you know, hey, we're having to throw out a lot of these leads. That might be a clue to look at this. Also, if you're running any account based marketing or ABM campaigns where you're targeting specific companies by name, if you're producing leads from companies that are not on your ABM list, that could be a clue that your audience expansion is turned on. And if you were paying close attention to the performance of your account, and audience expansion was turned on, it's likely you've cut budget from LinkedIn because the leads you were getting were not the quality that you would expect them to be worth for paying $8 to $11 per click. Here's a quick sponsor break. And then we'll dive into the last three LinkedIn Ads mistakes that you should be looking out for. 13:08 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com. The LinkedIn Ads experts. 13:17 If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We manage many of LinkedIn's largest accounts and we're the only media buying agency to be official LinkeBdIn partners, and performance to your goals is our only priority. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to get in touch and we'd absolutely love to help you demolish your goals. Okay, with that being said, let's jump into the next three mistakes. 13:46 Mistake #3 is using automated bidding. Okay, this is a big deal. So let me explain what I mean here. There is definitely a time and a place for running automated bidding and it should be part of your bidding strategy. But realize that because it's the default type of bidding, and 90% of the time, it's the most expensive way to pay for your traffic on LinkedIn, there's a reason why I'm on the lookout for this while I'm auditing accounts. To break it down. Automated bidding is just a fancy name for CPM bidding, where LinkedIn controls your bid. It's a little bit like handing LinkedIn, your wallet and saying please be gentle spend what you think you need. Now I am admittedly a very performance based marketer, which means I'm always looking for the lowest cost per lead the lowest cost per opt in possible for whatever budget I'm working with. And I know that all things held equal, let's say no matter what traffic you send to a landing page, it's always going to convert at the same rate. What that means is to get the lowest cost per lead, I have to pay the least amount per click possible. So if you're looking at just your effective cost per click. If you are bidding by CPM, this leads to a higher effective cost per click anytime your click through rate is less than two and a half times the average. Now I know this is complex, so I'll break it down for you. What this means is if you are bidding any kind of CPM model, whether it's automated or explicitly CPM bidding, it means you are paying more per click than if you were bidding cost per click. If your click through rates are not two and a half times the LinkedIn benchmark average, which is a lot. That means that your ads literally have to perform two and a half times better than the average before CPM bidding becomes a good deal before it even breaks even with CPC bidding. This is easiest to measure with sponsored content with sponsored content, the average is about .4%. And so anytime that I see a click through rate Over 1% I know that it's cheaper to bid CPM for my traffic than it is CPC. So you could imagine the 10% of the time that someone launches an ad that is significantly above the average, then yeah, automated bidding is going to look great to them. And I talked to plenty of advertisers who've gotten great success, just taking the default options in their campaign launching, and they just happen to land in the top 10% of advertisers. The rest of the time, though, CPM bidding is going to cost significantly more than the equivalent click if you are bidding by cost per click. So just because your account is using automated bidding, does not mean that you're bad, doesn't mean that you're a terrible marketer. But if you've tested into automated bidding, and you know that you're getting the cost efficiency that you're looking for, then you've got no judgement for me. If you just selected automated bidding, because that's what LinkedIn told you to do, that's where I've got a problem with it and you should probably rethink those priorities. If your account is running automated bidding across all campaigns, that's likely a sign that either #1 your account manager doesn't know what they're doing or #2 the account managers focus is to simply spend the budget and it's not to efficiency of your performance. Or heck, you might have this option 3, maybe every campaign is performing over two and a half times the benchmark average and automated bidding is the cheapest way to get traffic. And if this is the case, good on you, I'm cheering you on. For more understanding about how bidding and budgeting work, check out episode 6 where we dive in and dissect all of the different options there. 17:43 Okay, Mistake #4, and it's related and this is your bidding too high. If you're using CPC bidding, like you know you're supposed to be doing, but you are swayed by the siren song of LinkedIn's recommended bid ranges, you are likely paying way too much for your time traffic. You see LinkedIn's suggested bid ranges are quite frankly ridiculous. I don't have a better way to describe this. They'll say something like your competition is bidding between $14 and $38 per click. No, they are not. I can count on one hand, the number of advertisers I know who can be profitable on clicks in that price range. And that's generally because when they sell something, they make a million dollars. So if you have an enterprise sized budget, and you're spending six figures per month, yes, you will have to bid aggressively to get the traffic you need in a lot of cases. But if you're not spending enterprise size budgets, let's say you're spending less than $15,000 a month on ads, you likely don't need nearly that aggressive of bidding. What ends up happening is when you are bidding too high, you end up blowing all of your budget in the middle of the night because remember in North America, our budgets start fresh for the day between 5pm and 9pm, the day before. So if you ever hit your budget, your budgets become active between 5p and 9pm at night, the next day, and then you're bidding super aggressively to the insomniacs, the people who are not able to sleep, they're scrolling through their phone. And of course, they're probably not going to convert. And if they do, they may not remember that they converted in the morning. Now, let's imagine that you actually do make it through the night and your budget is still spending during the day. Oftentimes here you will end up blowing the whole rest of your budget at the very first part of the day, and then your ads will shut off, and you'll stop getting traffic the whole last half of the day. If you talk to your LinkedIn rep if you have one, they will tell you know you want to bid aggressively so that you get the best quality of your audience. Well, here's the thing, if you're worried about getting the best quality of your audience, then tighten your targeting. Make sure that everyone within your targeting is a good fit for you. And then you don't have to worry about this. Although in all of the testing I've done, I've never found lead quality to decrease when my bidding decreased as well. Now, not only did you not get to run your ads for the whole rest of the day, or maybe you spent way too quickly, you also paid two to six times more per click than you should have, which we've know that CPC really isn't everything, but it probably means that your costs per lead are two to six times higher than they could be or should be. Remember this rhyme. If you hit your budget during the day, it means you pay too much for your clicks along the way. Again, go listen to Episode 6 of this podcast on bidding and budgeting to go more in depth there on how the bidding and auction system works. 20:53 Okay, last one, Mistake #5. If you are not tracking properly now I came to advertising from the Google Ads world far, long, long, long ago. And Google advertisers have been spoiled for so many years, because Google owns both Google Ads and Google Analytics. So they have this option called auto tagging, where inside of your Google Ads, you can just tick the box that says, yes, do auto tagging. And then every ad automatically sticks on all of these tracking parameters for Google Analytics to pick up and recognize. This means that you have perfect attribution of the ad was clicked at x time, it came from y keyword, and it was in z ad group. This is fantastic for people who are just advertising on Google. But for every other platform, you need to put tracking codes in each of your links so that your analytics and CRM package can recognize where that traffic is coming from. This allows you to associate the leads that come from your advertising efforts. With how much you spent to acquire them. So this gives you the ability to figure out what is my cost per qualified lead? What is my cost per sale? What is my ROI look like? These are all things you can do if you're tracking. If you're not tracking, you're totally blind past the initial form fill. A lot of times you'll hear this tracking, referred to as UTM parameters, because that was the system that Google Analytics came up with that most started to adopt. If you use a different analytics package than Google, you'll have different names for these tracking parameters. Now, if all you care about is your cost per form fill, yeah, you don't need to track because LinkedIn can track the conversion the same way it knows which ad was clicked, by whom and whether or not someone converted. And certainly conversion tracking is super, super important. So you can get a get at least your finger on on the pulse of performance. Are you doing amazing? Or are you totally up the creek without a paddle, or somewhere in between? But if all you are tracking is just the presence of a conversion how much you paid for that, you're really gonna miss the point of LinkedIn Ads, which is the lead quality. We know that LinkedIn costs per click are oftentimes two to five times higher than Facebook's. So if you were running both LinkedIn and Facebook side by side, if you were only comparing your cost per conversion, you'd have no other conclusion to come to except LinkedIn ads is way too expensive and you should push all of your budget away from there and into Facebook. You'll miss the fact that the lead quality on LinkedIn is often much higher than two to five times better than that of Facebook. Now, if all you're using is just LinkedIn's lead gen form ads, you really don't have to worry about this too much because this traffic is not hitting your website. So you're not going to be tracking it with UTM parameters or some other kind of tracking parameter. LinkedIn is going to be passing this information into your CRM, which campaign, which ad it was. So you're probably pretty well taken care of here. So if you're not using tracking parameters like UTM parameters in all of your advertising, this is a great time to stop and start adding them in now, in the show notes, I included a great article from HubSpot, about how to use UTM parameters, how they work, how they look how to fix them to your tracking links. Okay, so that's really it the top five mistakes that I see advertisers making on LinkedIn ads, and if you're making them, it's a great time to get them fixed. And if your agency is making them well, there's not much of an excuse for that. So reach out! B2Linked.com rocks at running your LinkedIn Ads. Okay, I've got the episode resources coming up for you so stick around. 25:05 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 25:14 Okay, here are the great resources that we talked about in this podcast episode. First is the HubSpot link that I just mentioned about UTM parameters. Check that one out, it's a great read. Also, our episode on bidding and budgeting was episode 6. Make sure you listen to that. And then also Episode 7 about account organization. Super, super valuable. And again, they touch on many of these same topics and even go deeper. If you are brand new to LinkedIn Ads or trying to get to learn them. The best way you can do this is by taking the LinkedIn Learning course taught by me, and it's called Advertising on LinkedIn. Search for LinkedIn Advertising or LinkedIn Ads. You won't be able to miss it. The picture of On the cover is really silly. It's me pointing at the camera and I'm, I'm a chubby ginger dude. In just over an hour, this course covers what I usually take about an hour and a half in person in my one on one trainings to cover. And if you have LinkedIn premium, this is free. If not, I think it's only 25 bucks, whereas I charge $500 an hour. So this is by far the most economical way to learn about LinkedIn Ads. Definitely whatever podcast player you're listening on, please hit that subscribe button if you want to hear more episodes like this where we dive deep into LinkedIn Ads. I would also encourage you to rate the podcast. Of course we love five stars. But of course, I'm big on honesty and transparency here. And please do review it the more people who review the higher this ranks in the podcast listings, and I would love it if more LinkedIn advertisers got to hear about this. And of course, I'd love to shout out your review as well if you leave that. With any ideas for the show or questions, feel free to reach out to Podcast@B2Linked.com and I'd love to entertain your ideas. I'll see you back here next week! Cheering you on and your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources: LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Show Transcript: The absolute lowest cost way to generate leads using LinkedIn Ads. This is it. Stay tuned. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. 0:19 Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics, because of LinkedIn's higher costs, most of our clients are interested in any performance increases we can find. And one of the most common ways of getting cost per lead down is by using LinkedIn lead generation form ads. About 60% of our clients use these exclusively so there's definitely something to them. So we're going to go into a lot of detail about them. Let's hit it. 0:44 I wanted to highlight some of the reviews that you as listeners have been leaving on the podcast pages, so please keep those coming. Lucamelie, or Lucamelie in the UK says "super valuable information. I've been following AJ on YouTube and LinkedIn for over for a year now. He consistently provides excellent value and I'm so pleased he's doing this podcast. AJ, if you're reading this thanks a million for being so generous with your knowledge." Luca, thank you. I am reading it. Thanks for leaving it. And that totally makes my day. All right, Richie Norton in the US just simply says "genius". You want to know who's a genius, Richie Norton. He is the modern day Stephen Covey, call him a friend and his show is absolutely epic. So check out his show. It's all about leadership and life and goals. And he's got a really interesting model where he'll do three episodes per week. One is an interview. One is kind of like an after review and then one is a solo cast from him talking about that particular topic and and expanding. So really, really cool if you're into leadership. Okay, NN1292 in the US, says the podcast "I've been waiting for. First off your podcast is great, and I've already benefited from the information you provide along with your insight. I look forward to listening to additional episodes in the future. You seem to have a lot of experience and it would be amazing if you could share some real world solutions and strategies that have aided you in the past. As a marketer growing in the field of this sort of content, it'd be super helpful, especially since it's not easy to find content specific for B2B. Again, thanks for doing the great work. And I'll definitely be tuning again in again soon". Thanks for the glowing review, as well as the suggestion on what we can do. I'm gleaning from this that in the future, we should do more of applicability, more case study type stuff. This is why we did this and this was the effect. So definitely gonna be baking that into the future content. I'll try to bake it in as we go as well. So I do want to feature you please do go and leave reviews. And I'll give you a shout out as well. 2:48 Okay, so let's jump into what is the lead gen form ad to start out with? Well, the way I describe it, this is like when someone interacts with your ad, rather than sending them to a landing page on your website or just off of LinkedIn, a drawer will slide down from the ad itself containing a form, a native form from LinkedIn. And it gives someone the opportunity to convert without even leaving the LinkedIn experience, which is fantastic for a lot of ways. The chief have, which is that it's the highest converting way of getting someone because it takes away so much of the friction. When we implement these, we see an average increase of conversion rates of 10 to 50%. So this is literally like you could take whatever you're doing now and get 10 to 50% more leads for exactly the same money. That's really how it works. And quite often, actually, we'll see double or sometimes even tripling of conversion rates. In pretty much every type of offer every situation, using lead gen form ads is going to be the cheapest way to capture someone's information/ Prospects who are interacting with these forms have a much higher level of trust because they don't have to leave the LinkedIn experience. It's familiar to them. And plus any information that LinkedIn knows about this individual is going to be prefilled. So if you ask for information, like their job title, or their industry or company size, LinkedIn will just automatically fill that out. So all the prospect has to do especially on mobile device where entering extra information is extra cumbersome, LinkedIn is going to make that super easy so all someone has to do is just hit the send button. You can use these for most of the ad formats. So any sort of sponsored content, whether that single image, carousel, video, maybe even if there's going to be future versions of sponsored content, surely, the lead gen form ad is going to be supported by it. Also, any sort of sponsored messaging, so that includes message ads, plus the new conversation ads. Now are these a silver bullet for advertisers? Well, they can be, but not always. There are some limitations and there are some potential warnings to keep in mind about them. So first complaint that you may hear about them is that they lead to poor lead quality. Your sales team may reach out to someone and they might say something like, ah, I don't remember filling out a form. I don't think I contacted you guys. Now, don't be worried this isn't fake form fills that are happening. This is just that LinkedIn made it so easy for someone to convert that if they waited long enough, they're going to forget that they actually filled out the form, it didn't make a strong enough impression on them because it was so easy and so quick. It required less effort. And traditionally, the more effort you require from someone, the more of their attention you're going to get. It's also less of a special experience for the user visually, because they're used to seeing things on LinkedIn and they're used to seeing things move quickly like scrolling through a feed, whereas if they land on a landing page, they will see your brand front and center. They'll have the opportunity to click around and read more about your team and see what you are offer. So that's a lot of freedom that you're not going to get if you're just going to stay within the LinkedIn experience. And you'll hear exactly the same complaints about this from advertisers who've used Facebook's version, what they call lead ads. And it's exactly the same reason. It's just making it so easy that people may not remember doing it. So make sure you are following up on these quickly so that you get fewer people who forgot that you exist. The next is you actually do need some additional systems in place to make use of them. So once the lead is submitted, it goes into the LinkedIn ads platform. And it's really cumbersome to go in. You go into account assets. And lead generation forms. And then you click on the lead generation form that you're using. And then you can download a CSV. I guarantee everyone listening to this right now is paid way too much to make this your job to go in and download a CSV every single day. So you'll definitely want to get these leads out with I'm sort of partner integration. So we'll go into that here soon. But you also need to reach out to them with email software, whether that's marketing automation, or CRM, to actually fulfill on what you gave them. Because if someone fills out one of these forms, and then you follow up 24 hours later and say, "Hey, here's that piece of content you requested", chances are, so many more of them are going to forget that they ever did that or change their mind. So you want this to be fast, you'll want to use an email software system to immediately follow up with them. Another complaint that you'll hear from other advertisers is "Ah, my sales team only likes emails that are professional, but all the G mails and the Yahoo's those personal emails are worth less to us". And quite honestly, I like the personal emails, because if I get a list of personal emails, that's going to match at a really high rate on both LinkedIn and Facebook and Google and Twitter if I'm doing these custom audience retargeting, so from a nurture perspective, I really like, but I realize a lot of sales teams will kind of frown on personal emails, and you absolutely will get more of these. You can't track lead gen form ads nearly as well as you can track a landing page visit. So I'll illustrate this by showing both pathways. If you send to a landing page, you can have a form on that landing page that captures all of their UTM and tracking parameters from the URL and passes it right into your CRM. And then you can run reports later on, grab those parameters, and you can marry them up with your LinkedIn reporting to get a cost per every stage of the funnel. It's beautiful. You can tie every piece of performance all the way back to the exact ad, the exact audience that sent it. Now consider if you're using lead gen form ads, someone's going to fill out the form on LinkedIn. There's no sort of dynamic tracking available here. LinkedIn will tell you very accurately all the way down to the time where someone fills out the form, but they won't pass anything further. So if you wanted to go really, really specific and track every ad all the way down to the ad level, you would need a separate lead gen form on LinkedIn for every single ad that you publish. And smaller accounts, you can make this work, but larger accounts, oh, this is cumbersome to do, and we've done it. The other big challenge here is you can't retarget the traffic. So if you send traffic to your landing page, you can then pick that traffic up with your Google retargeting, your Facebook retargeting, and stay in front of these people to stay top of mind. And it creates an awesome audience for nurture. But because this traffic never hit your landing page and never hit your website, LinkedIn has all of the data about them and they're not sharing it with you. And then LinkedIn won't let you retarget this that's as of the time of recording yet, but they are working on engagement retargeting that I'm told should be out somewhere between July and October of 2020. At that point we'll be able to retarget users. So something like if someone opened the lead form but didn't actually fill it out or didn't submit it, then we can retarget them and show them a different offer or show them the same offer until they do convert. So I'll be excited for engagement retargeting to come out, so we can start retargeting these lead gen form ads traffic. 10:23 Okay, so how do you actually create these? Well, first you go to account assets right from your ads account and click on lead generation forms. Then you'll create a new form right there. And what I would recommend you do lose the super in depth tracking here. But for every offer, I would recommend one single lead generation form, and then send all of your ads that are going to that offer to the same form. So you'll have maybe 15, 20, 50 different ads all leading towards or all attached to the same form. Next, you either go to a campaign that already has the lead generation objective or you create one. And you'll go through the normal process of defining who your audience is and writing your ad. But then as soon as you're done writing the ad, it will ask you which form you want to attach it to. Now, if you haven't already created your form through account assets, lead generation forms, it will let you create one from right within the campaign build itself, but certainly that's a little bit more cumbersome. Keep in mind that these ads do require a privacy policy on your website, or just written into the the form itself. So be prepared, make sure you do have your privacy policy all ready. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into how to make the best use of your lead gen formats. 11:44 The LinkedIn Ads show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. 11:53 If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you B2Linked, the agency you'll want to work with. We manage LinkedIn's largest accounts and are the only media buying agency to become official LinkedIn partners. And performance to your goals is our only priority. So fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to get in touch, and we'd love to help you absolutely demolish your goals. 12:17 Alright, let's jump into what you do with your leads once they come in, and what options you'll get to include. I mentioned earlier that you'll want to make sure that you're using an integration partner to get your leads out. There are three different ways of doing that. The first is the manual download. Booooo, don't do it. It's not worth anyone's time. I mean, seriously, don't even hire a VA for this. The next though is you use one of their partner services. So some of these partner services are things like HubSpot, Eloqua, Marketo, Salesforce, there are quite a few, but they also tend to be pretty enterprise level software. So if you happen to be running a small account where maybe you don't own any of these enterprise level softwares, then you'll want third option here which is Zapier.com. And on their $20 a month plan, you can get all of these leads exported to pretty much whatever you want. So if you want these leads sent to your email and sent to a sales rep's Google sheet that they keep actively updated and then sent right into like a MailChimp or something, you can do that kind of logic with the Zapier $20 per month plan. There are some very cool strategic ways that you can use these lead gen formats. So I want to talk about two of those first. One of my favorite ways to use these is to actually test your landing pages. So in this case, you're not using lead gen form ads at all. You're sending a right to a form on your website somewhere and you know what your conversion rate is. So let's say you're seeing a low conversion rate, maybe you're only converting at 8%. What you can do is go and take that exact same ad the exact same offer and Create that as a lead gen form ad. And then you start measuring the cost per conversion and your conversion rate, especially conversion rate. And what you'll find is, on average, you'll see a 10 to a 50% increase in conversion rate, so expect that. But if it's larger than that, then this might be a good way for you to go, "oh, this makes sense, my landing page is hindering conversion somehow". And that can be the start of you saying, "hey, I'm going to start testing things on my landing page". Or "I'm going to go and make a case to my boss that we need to bring someone in to create a better landing page experience". So this can be good data for you. If you can find out that the same offer the same ad converts better as a lead gen form, then that signals there's probably something wrong with the website or at least something that can be improved. The next cool strategic use of these lead gen formats is to test the difference in your lead quality between your lead generation ads and your landing pages. If you are running these in parallel long enough, what you'll find is, yeah, sure these lead gen form ads will increase conversion rates, but your lead quality will also on average decrease. So if you can balance these out, if you've gotten, let's say 50% more leads, and your lead quality only decreased by about 30%, you still have a net increase of 20%. And it totally makes sense to use these lead gen formats. However, if that's reversed, if your conversion rate increases by 30%, but your lead quality decreases by 50%, you are still much better to send to a landing page. Now my bias is if it's even close, I mean, if I'm getting a similar cost per qualified lead, let's say from lead gen formats as I am from my own landing page, I want to use my own landing page 100% of the time, because then I can track it with Google analytics or whatever tracking I'm doing down to a very granular level. And I can also retarget that traffic with every network out there, LinkedIn included. So there's so much more freedom you get by having traffic that you own on your own website. But certainly, if it's better in your favor, you're getting a cheaper cost per lead, or cheaper cost per sales qualified lead from your lead gen form ads, then absolutely pursue that 100%. Okay, option wise, the prefilled fields that LinkedIn has, they have most that are prefilled, but some that someone will actually have to fill in themselves. And the way it works is if LinkedIn has it, they will pre-fill it. And if they don't have it, then they'll leave it blank and the prospect will have to go in and write it themselves. The standard fields that I generally recommend are first name, last name, and email. And if you take all three of those fields, it should convert at the highest rate. You're asking for very little and the email address that it fills out is going to be most likely. I mean, it's their profile email, which is most likely a Gmail or a personal email of some kind. If you want to ask more for that, or if you need to ask more from them, then you can ask for their city, their country, their phone number, their zip code, or postal code, their state province. And you can ask them for their work email, but there's no validation to make sure that it actually is a work email so they can just, it's a blank field so they could just write their profile email in, you'll probably still get quite a few of these personal emails as well. You can ask for work phone number. Obviously, anytime you ask for a phone number, people are expecting a phone call and it's going to scare them away. You will see a lower conversion rate if you're using those. You can ask for their job title, their job function, which is their department, their level of seniority, their company name, their industry company size, and on the education side, you can also ask for their degree, their field of study, their graduation date, their start date And the school that they went to or graduated from. You can also ask for their gender, which will not be prefilled. Because if you remember from our targeting episode, gender is an inferred characteristic based off of their first name. And so it's not always accurate. LinkedIn doesn't want to assume here where the user will actually see what LinkedIn considers them to be. There's a new addition here, though, which is one of my favorite, you can insert their LinkedIn profile URL. The reason I love this is it's so low friction, of course, someone filling it out is going to say, "oh, well, my LinkedIn profile is public anyway so I don't care". That's not a high friction kind of field. But if you have a link to someone's LinkedIn profile, you also know immediately what company they work at. And you can follow that to see what size of company and what industry and you can look at. You can find out so much that you don't have to actually ask for this information in the field. Because if you're asking for five, seven, eight pieces of information, you're going to scare a lot of people away because you're asking so very much. So if I have my way with it, I'm going to ask for first name, last name, email, and LinkedIn profile URL. You can also include some custom questions. These can be a single line or a multiple choice. And you can also attach a checkbox, a custom checkbox. You can decide whether or not that is required. Everything else is required. But this custom checkbox can be not required. And then you do have hidden fields you can insert if you need UTM parameters in the traffic as it comes from the lead generation form to the thank you page or whatever experience you're sending them to after. You can have those come through. But like we talked about earlier, this is at the form level. And so if LinkedIn is listening, I would absolutely love in the future if we could put dynamic parameters in here. So if we could maybe dynamically insert the campaign Id or the ad ID or both, or maybe some other parameter from the campaign, the campaign name, something. This would be super helpful. And then we wouldn't have to create an individual form for every single ad if we wanted to track much deeper into our CRM. Okay, stepping off my soapbox there. 20:19 Tracking these can be an issue. So let's talk through that one. Tracking down to the cost per lead is totally flawless. You don't have to worry about tracking pixels. You don't have to worry about them clearing or making sure that they are associated to the campaign. There's none of that. You just launch a lead gen form ad and immediately you're getting conversion information. But if you need to go deeper than cost per lead, or lead conversion rate, now that's going to be a problem. The most sophisticated advertisers are using this solution right now where they create one whole form for every single ad. And that may be worth it for tracking, but boy is that cumbersome to actually administer. And again, I think everyone listening to this is probably, it's way below your paygrade to do that kind of work. But it is possible if you want to get your tracking on point. Depending on the partner you're using, it can actually pass your campaign ID and your ad ID. So you might be able to capture those and pass those somehow into your CRM so that you can match the individual ad back with like a V lookup from a LinkedIn report. So you may be able to do something like this. I haven't fully explored it yet. I think it's possible. But you may be stuck with the one form per ad if you don't want to do all of that technical juggling. And then for retargeting, since the traffic doesn't actually hit your website, you can't retarget them. So LinkedIn, like we mentioned, is going to have engagement retargeting sometime in Q3, but it also means if you're using these, you can't do your retargeting with Google and Facebook, which is such a valuable thing right now. As a quick recap, LinkedIn lead gen formats are they cheapest way to get your ideal prospects into your database for nurturing. They are fantastic if you just need to show results fast, or show the value of the channel to prove it out, you should start seeing leads come in very quickly. And pretty much no matter what your offer is, these will convert higher than if you sent them to your landing page. However, if you want meaningful interactions with a very, very important VIP kind of audience, I would still suggest sending to a landing page. Or if you require that you have the retargeting or tracking abilities that you would only get from sending to a landing page, then absolutely, same deal. When you're thinking lead gen form ads think that this is quantity over quality. So if your goal is quality, time, and attention from a very important prospect, definitely send to landing page. But if your goal is to get the cheapest cost per on your ideal audience, get them into your database for nurturing and so you can start doing some outreach Yeah, lead gen formats are going to be by far and away the best way to do that. Okay, I've got some episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around. 23:15 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 23:24 If this is the first one you're listening to make sure you hit that subscribe button in your podcast player. And definitely do a rate and review I would love to shout you out and feature you in the review section. So whatever podcast player you're on, go and review there. I would love to hear, especially any feedback. But of course, I'd love to know that this is making a difference in your own professional careers and lives. If you're new to LinkedIn advertising, definitely check out the LinkedIn advertising course on LinkedIn learning, that I partnered with LinkedIn to do. It's incredibly inexpensive and it's a great from beginning to maybe slightly intermediate type of course, so check that out. And if you're a LinkedIn pro subscriber, then you should have LinkedIn Learning for free. So it should be a just totally free course. If not, I think it's only $25, so definitely worth checking them out. If you have any feedback for the show, or any topics you'd like to have us cover, reach out at Podcast@B2Linked.com. I'll see you back here next week cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show resources: LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course Pages Announcement Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Transcript: LinkedIn Pages just got another major update and advertisers are going to be excited. Why? Let's find out. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics, on May 12, of 2020, LinkedIn Pages just got a major update. So I brought Ting Ba who is over pages at LinkedIn back onto the podcast to tell us about them. We talk about LinkedIn Live, LinkedIn Events, and especially how advertisers are going to get to use them. Let's hit it. Alright, Ting Ba I'm so excited to have you back on the podcast. It's actually been six months or more since we chatted last time, but our listeners will know you from the episode that aired just about a month ago. So listeners make sure you understand, this isn't us having a conversation a month after, it's been quite a bit and really excited to go over the new product releases from Pages. For those of you who don't remember or maybe didn't catch Ting's episode, she leads Product Marketing for LinkedIn Pages at LinkedIn. So this is fantastic. There's plenty of crossover into the ad side of the business. But anything you do with organic, you'll really appreciate that as well. So Ting, thank you so much for joining. We're excited to have you here. Thank you. Thank you so much, AJ. I'm so excited to be here today. Well, this is awesome to have you talking. I mean, just barely, barely, all of these new changes rolled out. I know you're on a quarterly release schedule. So this is a big deal. I've been waiting for working towards this for quite a while. First off, catch us up on what's changed since we spoke at the end of 2019. You know, from the last podcast episode. Well, you know, not much has really changed in the world. I mean, just kidding right? A lot has happened since then! You know, just gotta take a step back and just kind of outside of LinkedIn, like what's been happening in the world. A lot has changed. I mean just to start with, you know, the spread of Coronavirus. That has literally impacted every single one of us on a deeply personal level, like not just in the United States, but across the world. And you know, I'd say just to start, we've all had to adjust, right, just sheltering in place, working from home. So that's like, just as a basic start. And this is something that's not only impacted like us every single day, but it also affects our customers, right? Our customers being those that want to advertise and promote their products to specific audiences. It makes it very hard for them primarily because actually Events is one of the best ways for brands to actually build relationships. It's real time and it's in real life. And I'd say one of the biggest impacts we've seen is that people are no longer able to actually get together with people in real life because it's not safe. And so one thing we've been really focusing on is helping our brands to bring their professional communities together and stay connected even during these times. And so that's something that we've seen really shift on in our macro environment. It's something we've worked very hard to adjust to it. and deliver to our customers. So you heard loud and clear, because it's something they really need and want. And I'm assuming I mean, I saw LinkedIn totally turn on a dime. As soon as the COVID stuff happened, your product roadmap totally changed towards things that are going to help now rather than you know, what we've been planning for the last year. Can you describe what what was that process? Like, as soon as you realize there's a world crisis going on, we need to change the direction of our product entirely. That's a really great question, AJ. And I would say it's probably been one of the most rewarding experiences I've had in my career. So it was I would say, you know, high stress and high demand because not only were we pivoting all to working from home and trying to figure out school care at the same time and trying to figure out what we're going to do with the roadmap, it was very clear that there was a lot of value we could add at this moment. Our customers are largely B2B brands at LinkedIn. And a lot of them were finding that their events right which are the actual most effective channel for marketers to get in front of their target audiences. These events suddenly they had to be canceled right at the last minute because people can't get together in person. And yet these events are highly important that he still needs to do it. And they still needed to bring their community together. And so the more we talk to our customers, the more we realized that there was a true opportunity for us to launch a virtual events portfolio sooner rather than later. And so I'm very proud of our team. Everyone from our design team, to our engineering teams, a product for really rallying together, and really accelerating and building the solution within just two months. I'm very excited to announce that, you know, we have not only one, we have two solutions, to help our customers drive impact with their target audiences. And also, AJ you touched upon a really good point earlier, which is that the world that I manage is organic solutions. So what brands can do for free on our platform today, I do want to really emphasize that in the coming month, there's going to be opportunities to drive more than just organic opportunities, but sponsorship opportunities as well for brands can essentially retarget people who attend their events or perhaps invite people beyond their you know, Page followers or the personal connections, and so a real chance for scale. And that's coming in the following months. And I'm happy to give you a bit more of a preview into our roadmap. And this is so exciting to me. I mean, obviously, the the interplay of how we can start to use this in an ad format within campaign manager is really exciting to me and and this audience, specifically, one of the biggest announcements that you made this last week was about LinkedIn live. So can you tell us what is new and what's changed since this quarterly product release? Of course, I'm happy to do so AJ. And actually, before we go down into the path of live or LinkedIn events, I first want to take a step back and share that what we have to offer folks is actually not just one solution, but actually a portfolio of solutions that can help brands find their voice and also stay connected to their community on LinkedIn. And so depending on what your objective is, there's different solutions for you. So say for example, you're trying to drive top-level awareness. If that's the case, then what I recommend is actually leveraging LinkedIn Live because live is really all about driving viewership, right? Anyone could discover your live stream. And actually live streams have the ability to go viral. So LinkedIn Live is really best when you're trying to get in front of new audiences and build your brand. Now, if you're trying to really drive more mid-funnel marketing campaigns, you're trying to nurture audiences who are already familiar with your brand. This is where LinkedIn Events come in. Because you can invite very specific people to attend your event, and only those who say they're going to tend to view it. And so that's why there's different solutions depending on your objectives. That's key to know. Now that you understand kind of the landscape, I can then talk more about each feature in and of itself. So starting first with LinkedIn Live, right we know this is not new. We talked about this during, you know, my last appearance on the podcast. It remains one of our most beloved features on Pages. People love being able to go live with new audiences on our platform. And it's incredibly discoverable and can go viral. So great for top funnel marketing. Some top use-cases we've seen since we've talked, especially during this kind of COVID. We've seen brands really leverage live to host q&a with their leadership, so they can share what their team is thinking right now about the overall COVID environment, how it's impacting them. And also hosting panel discussions with guests. So they can talk about key industry topics. So those are kind of things, the trends we're seeing lately with live. Now, as far as new features we've launched over the past quarter, there's a couple of new things we added based on feedback, we've heard directly from advertisers that will really help them. And these will not only help brands make the most of the live stream, but it will help them to actually make those live streams a lot more valuable, even after it's over. And so first up, I'd love to talk about a feature that actually helps brands extend their reach beyond their immediate page following. And this feature is around embedded URLs, which essentially allows you to take an embedded URL, and then post it to your company's site, so that you can simultaneously stream for both your company website, as well as the LinkedIn platform. So this streaming is really going to help you extend your viewership because you're literally streaming from two locations at the same time. This is something we heard from a lot of people, that would be a really important thing to include. So we've watched that over the past couple months. So that's exciting to know. Another feature I want to share with you, this one's actually more about driving engagement with folks and creating great content long after your live stream is over. And this is all about our trimming feature. So this feature is super cool. Basically brands with this feature, they can easily edit their live stream once it's done. So they can like create a highlight reel, right, which they can use to promote their broadcasts long after it's done and maybe generate interest for people to attend in for the next live stream. And you know, lastly, to help draw attention to all the great video content that brands are creating, we've actually launched a new video tab on LinkedIn pages, right, so it's brand new, dedicated tab, or brands can host all their video content. And actually, as I mentioned earlier, with a trimming feature, you can easily create a highlight reel. I highly recommend using this feature to create a highlight reel and actually pinning it to the top of your video tab. So that it's top of mind when people visit your video tab for the first time. It'll get people excited about the fact that you're doing live streams that you can drive more viewership to the next one you do. So that's essentially what's new with LinkedIn Live? These are awesome features. I'm curious, for those who might be interested in LinkedIn Live either personally or from their page, what's the process to apply? And what does it actually like to start using it? It's a great question. You know, we get this question all the time, because it sounds great in terms of a concept, but how do you actually get started. And so there's a couple steps involved. First step, you have to apply in order to livestream. And you can very easily access the application, either Google LinkedIn Live and you know, one of the first things to come up is a link to apply. And once you apply, you'll hear back within a week about whether your application is approved or not. Some common questions I get here is, you know, what is your what are the requirements in order to livestream? So generally speaking, you know, we try to keep the bar pretty, you know, I'd say, pretty fair, right? And so you need at least 1000 followers, so that when you do live stream, there is an audience right? We do expect that you have used organic video at least a couple times because if you never use video, it's very hard to go from no usage to suddenly live streaming. So those are those are the general requirements. And then once you are approved, you'll get an email with a list of resources tohelp you get started, which include the link to our best practices landing page that has a playbook. It has examples of how other brands have gone live by industry, and a whole wealth of resources to help you get started. And so that's the second step. And then once you read all those resources, it's time to actually go live. And there's actually a lot of help that we provide on how to actually do your very first live stream from helping you select the right partner to partner tool to integrate with, we also have really great customer service to help you in case you run into some trouble. And so we're here for you. Because we know like, live streaming, especially from home is not easy. So we make sure that we provide the support you need. That's wonderful. And I know when I very first started going live, there were no partners that had any sort of free integration. You were kind of stuck with it with a paid solution of some kind. And then I saw that restream came in with a freemium. So you can actually We go live for free on LinkedIn, which is really cool. Yeah, absolutely. So I don't know, are there other partners who are kind of moving towards that that freemium kind of model? Or is restream currently the the lowest cost way to stream? You know, that's a great question. Each of our partners actually has, you know, different pricing models, different customer support models, different features. And so I highly recommend you check out our LinkedIn live best practices page, because actually there is we're going to, you're going to find what we've put together, which essentially is like a cheat sheet or battle card, if you will, of where each brand plays in terms of pricing and in terms of support, etc. So you can kind of see what works best for you. Because depending on your objectives, depending on your budget, depending how frequently you go live, there's going to be there's going to be a specific solution that's going to be best for you. No one size fits all. So I highly recommend you check out our cheat sheet on that so you can make an informed decision on which partner you work with. Cool, I want to check out the cheat sheet for sure. I've worked with some streaming partners who support iOS devices, but not Android, some that are PC only, some that kind of do all of them. Some are mobile best, some are desktop best. And so definitely take a look at we break it all down for you. So you can make an assessment for yourself, which one you think would work best. So specifically to our audience of advertisers, we're going to be really excited about how we can leverage these LinkedIn events through a campaign manager through any sort of LinkedIn advertising. Can you tell us how can we leverage events now through the ad platform? It's a great question. And I have to say, just as a way to start, we're very, very excited about what events can do for advertisers. And we're hard at work to build out a more long term roadmap, so more to come on that. But in the near term, if advertisers want to promote events and get the right audiences to attend, what they can do is they can post about their event on their page and then sponsor that post with their target audiences. They can target people that look like your page followers or page visitors today, to make sure even more people are made aware of the event. So that's one of the things people can do in the near term. And there's a lot more to come on our monetization roadmap. Yes. excited for that! Me too. I think a lot of advertisers are interested in what sort of data they can get from events. I know earlier, you mentioned that there might be a possibility at some point of being able to retarget attendees. What does that data look like? And I think advertisers will also be interested in the lead gen form integration, so maybe collecting more data than they would get natively? Yeah, it's a great question. It's something we hear about often because people really want deeper insights on audiences that are attending to events, who are they and how do I best communicate with them. And so I can share with you that to start with the most recent launch, after you host your event, you'll be able to see a list of everyone who attended, which is an awesome preview into what kind of audience are most interested in captivated by your brand and by your content. And so when we find out who attended, is it just first name last name? Or will we get something like, first name, last name, profile URL? Is there something like that? Yeah, it's a great question to start. It's really you just see who attended. Their name and essentially, you can look at their profile if you'd like. But essentially, what you get to start is essentially like the person who attended their first name and last name, but because this is just the beginning for us, and we're all about adding value. We're committed to being agile and our roadmap, we're going to continue to add things that make it easier for brands target their audiences.  Wonderful. When can we expect to see this is this 100% rollout as of last last week, is this something that is just starting to roll out now? Who has access to events? And how can you log into their page and see whether or not they have access? Yeah, what a great question. So I would say this is a bit untraditional of a launch for us at least at Pages. Usually we do some testing, we'll roll it out in phases. But because we realize that this is such a key feature that our audiences really want from us, we want to make sure we get into everyone's hands as soon as possible. So actually, we launched last week to the broader pages community. And so you guys should all have access to host an event. If you go to your page, you'll see options. You should actually just in the feed to see perhaps invites to events or events that are have already happened. And so I highly encourage you to check it out. Start playing around with it. And so everyone has opportunity to access and in terms of what you can do organically, which is essentially creating an event making it public or private, in finding your page followers or first degree profile connections. Those are all things that you can do in the immediate near term. You can do this right now today, but in terms of the monetization opportunities, that's coming as a fast follow. And so as I mentioned, this is just the beginning or ganic start and very soon there's going to be opportunities to sponsor your event, drive broader reach, get better information on attendees, retarget them drive outcomes prove ROI. All that's coming. So you know, that's important. Perfect. So everyone, you heard Ting, this is rolled out to your profile right now. So go and take advantage of it. One thing I'm really excited about from an advertising perspective, is to try running something like a webinar through this. So if we test just normal webinar type offer on sponsored content, and then you test running through through an event specific post. I'm curious to see if that changes click through rates, because it's so new and novel. Yeah, and I love what you brought up webinars AJ, because as we really built this product, I had a lot of time to talk to event marketers. Event marketers is a really like umbrella term for a lot of different types of marketers, that would include, you know, demand generation marketers and includes traditional event marketers and includes talent branders you know, really all different types of marketers and one thing I've heard consistently is that being able to provide education on whether it's company culture, or perhaps a product, that's really, really key, right? That's a large reason why people do webinars in the first place and why they host events in the first place. It's either educate existing customers or bring folks further down the funnel. Now, one gap we saw on my research of over 80 different event marketers is that people are really craving a more modern environment in which to broadcast. One where there's opportunity to engage more deeply. And currently, a lot of webinar software doesn't allow for that. Some of them just feel perhaps that they haven't been updated in a bit and perhaps being able to broadcast in a much more captive professional environment would really, really kickstart on the engagement. And so I think we can really serve a lot of customers in this area. So webinars is something that we did that have a functionality is something we're going to be focusing on in the near future. I could almost see being able to run a webinar directly from LinkedIn live and not even worrying about having something like an ON24 or a Zoom to put the webinar on for you, so you've really given us a lot of tools so that as advertisers. This is awesome. Yes. And one thing I will encourage, you know, just throughout this whole process, we are committed to being agile on the roadmap. So please test. Test it out, try out an event for your own business, invite people whether it's a community gathering or a webinar that you're doing. Because then whatever your experiences, you can give us a feedback, we can make it better based on what you shared with us. And in terms of top use cases you can consider for LinkedIn Events, we really anticipate that there's going to be some use cases that will stand out above others. The first of which is, as you mentioned earlier, AJ product demos, right? Product demos webinars are a great way to help your customers better understand what you're building, and that's really a perfect use case for LinkedIn Events. Another great use case would be for talent branding. And so for example, you know, you have a highly coveted role. You have a lot of top candidates, you want to bring further down into the funnel. What you could do is host a q&a with a hiring manager. And of course, account based marketing, ABM. That's a really great use case for LinkedIn Events. Actually, I have a great example to share. Even though we just launched recently, we've had a chance to test this out interanlly quite a few times. LinkedIn marketing solutions, a couple of weeks ago, we held our own event. Actually, it was an ABM based event where we targeted specific customers. And we held a webinar about just how to think about marketing strategies at a time of COVID. And even though, you know, this is an early test, we got over 1,700 registrations. And I think the most important part of all this is that the event was about an hour and a half. But the average watch time was literally an hour. So that's incredible that people stayed for like 56 minutes to tune into our event. And I think this really just goes to show that this is an incredible tool for mid funnel education. Because it's incredibly hard to get people to sit still and listen right for even 20 minutes. The fact that they stayed for an hour means that you're really like, this is a platform where audiences are captive and you can get in front of the exact right people so that your payoff is incredible. If you get a one hour of someone else's time, that is an incredible success. And this is like with a lot large amount of attendees. And so this is just one proof point of many to come that like for, you know, B2B brands that are focused on educating and mid funnel objectives. LinkedIn events is an incredible, incredible thing to use. And you know, it's organic to start. You can you can test it out and see how it works out for you. And as a fast follow, we'll have leaad gen forms retargeting all these different kinds of things. And so now is the time to really test and build out your strategy. So you can think about application later on. Awesome. I know all of our advertisers are salivating right. I want to take a quick sponsor break here real fast, and then we'll jump right back in to have you talk about the video tab. The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you byB2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. If the performance of your LinkedIn ads is important to you, B2linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We manage LinkedIn's largest accounts and are the only media buying agency to be official LinkedIn partners and performance to your goals is our only priority. out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to get in touch, and we'd love to help you absolutely demolish your goals. All right, let's jump back into the interview with Ting Ba on the rest of the LinkedIn Pages release announcement. All right, Ting, tell us about the new video tab. I'd be happy to. So we're very excited to announce that we're launching a brand new tab on every LinkedIn page. So with a dedicated tab for all things video, and this is really in response to the fact that video is the fastest growing content type on our platform. Members love consuming video on LinkedIn. And so definitely having a dedicated tab or all of your awesome video content can be highlighted was something people have been wanting for a while and we're really glad that we're launching it now. And you know, with this video tab, what you can do is actually pin your key video content to the very top so it gets more of a spotlight. And something I recommended earlier right that you can do with any LinkedIn live stream is you can now easily trim write your live stream into shorter pieces and create like a highlight reel. And so for those who are trying to trying to drive more viewers to your LinkedIn live or even your LinkedIn events, simply, you know, create that highlight, highlight reel and pin it to the top of your video chat. So anyone who visits for the first time, they're going to see what you're all about. And they're going to get really excited to watch the next one helping you drive up viewership organically. Beautiful. And then how long are these video assets going to live there? Is there like a six month shelf life to them? Is it indefinite? It's indefinite. That's a great question because it's actually something that will live indefinitely. There is no expiration date. You can easily review the video we feel like it's no longer relevant. It's up to you what you curate, but there is no expiration date on these videos. Okay, so I know this is outside of your area. But I'm really curious, is there any sort of plan for a video tab on personal profiles as well as the company or is this company only at this point. At this point is company only but I love that idea or individuals on our profile. So it's something I may share back with the the team that builds that. Please share away that'd be awesome. And then you mentioned as part of the announcement, we saw there's a custom announced banner at the top of pages. Is this different from a pinned post? Is this different from just the background of the company page? How does this look? How can we think about this? Yes, that's a great question. And I'm excited to talk about this one, too. So our custom announced banner is down from a pinned post. Just to take a step back, you know, this quarter, we felt it was very important to help brands uplevel their most important messages that they want to share with their community. And so that's what this custom announcement banner is all about, is allows you to share the most critical and timely updates to the top of your page. So your community can stay updated on key topics like important hiring decisions, how you're shifting your operating priorities, or just overall how you're protecting your workforce. And so this is actually something we feel is very important. And so that's why we've launched it. And you'll also notice that in addition to this custom announcement banner, there's actually another option that people have when it comes to their custom CTA button, which is now allowing you to include a volunteer button on so you can help nonprofits or organizations that need help at this moment. So just a couple things are doing And help to help a response to kind of like this macro environment around COVID. Oh, that's amazing. And this was rolled out specifically for COVID. But I could see this being really useful even after the COVID crisis is over. I really think you're right about that. I think time will only tell but we foresee this continuing to be used after after COVID. And after, perhaps we're no longer sheltering in place. It may still be COVID related for a while, but I think it's going to continue to be very important when it comes to job opportunities and letting people know what the opportunities are more easily, or even just spotlight key initiatives that you're doing to, you know, to help kind of on a more macro level, I think this is going to be really important because I think what people really need in a time, like this is just a quick way to understand what are the most important things to know. And I think there's this customer announcement banner, it just gets people to highlight right away. And this banner, is it like an overlay kind of like a pop up? Does it sit at the top of the feed content? Yeah. It sits at the top of the feed content, and so it's going to be highly, highly visible when people visit your page for the first time. So if you have a let's say, we have one of those highlight reels pinned, this would show up right above the pinned post. Is that right? That's right. That's right. Love it! When you mentioned the volunteer button, how should advertisers look to potentially leverage that? What does it take to get access to that button? And is this going to continue living past the COVID situation? It's a great question. And what I'll share just more like just taking a step back, but I'll share more broadly is that, as of today, all pages have an option to add a custom call to action button or a CTA button. And there's multiple options you have such as try now, learn more, and it'll take you to a dedicated landing page that that an advertiser can choose him or herself. And this is an incredibly powerful tool because every single week, 4 million members click on this so you get a lot of information. And you also get analytics on who is clicking. And so this is an incredible free tool for you to basically drive bottom funnel conversion. But additionally, due to what's happening in the macro environment, we've introduced a new volunteer CTA button to help nonprofits ask members to volunteer for their causes. And so this button is specifically available for nonprofits. And we think that in addition to offering just general options for businesses to drive bottom of funnel conversion, we think it's equally important to drive action with nonprofits. And so nonprofit specifically will have this additional option of recruiting volunteers. And so in the case of a nonprofit, they could have both a custom CTA button and the volunteer button. It's just additional real estate for them. They actually can pick. So essentially, they can pick one option,/ So they can pick from like six different options versus five. They wouldn't have two, they would just be able to change their CTA button to specifically indicate that they're looking for volunteers. Okay, I think we covered the announcement really well. But I'm really curious to ask you, what are you most excited about either personally or professionally right now? Professionally, I'm very excited and proud that we launched LinkedIn virtual events last week. As I mentioned, It's been a real highlight, I think the biggest highlight of my career to be able to work with such a great team of launches in such a quick amount of time, we really wanted to make sure we met customers where they were, and they really wanted to continue to host their events and stay connected. And so we really rallied to make sure we could launch it in a short period of time. And so I'm just so proud of the team and excited and that this is launched, and I cannot wait to see how you all use it. I want to see how people are bringing a professional community together on LinkedIn, I imagine there's going to be a lot of unique and compelling stories coming out of this. And I can't wait to highlight those stories. I think the more examples we get, the more people will be using it. And I just, I can't wait to see how it's being used to market. And in terms of things I'm excited about personally, you know, it's interesting, because it's been quite the same for me as for everyone else. It's been a pretty interesting past couple months. I have two children, one that's two years old and one that's five years old, and both of them no longer are in school or no longer do we have childcare and so at first it was very painful to be a parent and also have to figure out homeschooling and child care. But I really learned to actually let go and not have a regimented schedule and not really care if their learning traditionally, and just focus on having time as a family. And the other day, my daughter was telling me that she's been having more fun than she's ever had when she was in school. And I know that in like, a couple years, maybe a decade, right, she's gonna look back. And this is going to be like a highlight for her. Maybe one of the best times ever like that she remembers spending a lot of time with her family. So I try to look for the silver lining in that we can all be together. I know that we're very fortunate for that. So I'm very happy about that. Personally, I just want to send peace and love to everyone in the world. Well, thanks for those vibes. That's awesome. And we've got our four kids at home. My poor wife is facing exactly the same thing.  will say we're finding that same silver lining and I just hope I realize a lot of people have kind of put traditional education on the backburner because it's just not happening. like as if they were in school, but I really hope this spurs a lot ofkids into learning about what their interests are and diving into new things that they wouldn't have learned in the classroom. So I'm excited for that. Okay, 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. Okay, as promised, we got a few great resources for you after this episode. The pages announcement that LinkedIn made on May 12 is they're available as a link right inside the show notes. So wherever you're listening, scroll down find the show notes. If you're on Spotify and you don't see it, then go check out the website, B2Linked.com, check out the blog, and you'll get to see all of the episodes show notes there. Also, if you're just getting started with LinkedIn Ads or need a little bit of assistance getting better or getting started, check out the course that I did with LinkedIn Learning. You can find the link there in the show notes as well taking you to the course. Check that one out. It's about an hour long, and it covers the first probably hour and a half of when I train people in real life. So if you were to bring me into your company to train you for $500 an hour, what you'd get for $750 is the same thing you'll get for $25 with the LinkedIn learning course. So I would encourage you to check that one out. That's the deal of the century as far as I'm concerned. Whatever podcast player you are listening on, please hit that subscribe button if you want to hear more about LinkedIn Ads coming right in your ear holes. And please do rate and review. I'm going to be featuring anyone who reviews here on the show. So if you want to be shouted out, then leave a review. I would absolutely love to hear it. Let me know any feedback you have for the show anything you'd like to see us include. And then with any ideas you've got, feel free to email us Podcast@B2Linked.com and we will happily address you. I'd love to hear any ideas you have for anything you'd love to cover. All right, we'll see you back here next week, cheering you on and your LinkedIn Ads initiative.

Show resources: LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course Benchmarks video from SME Easy jpg reference to keep around for quick comparison Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Transcript: How are your LinkedIn Ads performing? Good? Bad? How do you know? It's benchmarking time. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. 0:20 Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! I get asked all the time from advertisers if they're doing well or not. And imagine that people wanting to know if their efforts are paying off. So today we're diving into all the benchmarks so you can know how your efforts are stacking up. We'll cover the ad format averages, as well as what you should be paying and seeing with engagement and your conversion rates as well. Also, if you want to share this topic with someone who doesn't listen to podcasts, check out the video in the show notes that I did with Social Media Examiner. Okay, let's hit it. 0:53 In the news, the most interesting thing that I've heard is that LinkedIn Learning has seen a 3x in people taking their courses. And so this is recorded in COVID isolation right now, which was so interesting to see that people are taking advantage of the time when they're home alone, and maybe even laid off from work, and they're using this time to better themselves and improve. I thought that was great. That's one of those feel good statistics. I wanted to share a few of the reviews that you guys have left in your podcast players or on the podcast network. So Leonardo Bellini says "Ichiba, it means number one in Japanese. I think AJ is a fantastic trainer about LinkedIn Ads. Nobody knows LinkedIn Ads better than this guy". Oh, that is so awesome. Leonardo, I know him, he's from Italy. So Leonardo, shout out to you. Thanks so much for leaving such a kind review. Someone with the username Wolf STGT from Germany says excellent, valid information and hands on tips, keep rocking. Oh, thanks so much, Wolf. I appreciate that. Then there's Billy Boy UK in Great Britain says "great as always, consistently great, useful info from AJ". So thank you so much. And absolutely to anyone else listening, I want to feature you. So leave a review. Even if you don't rate me all the way up. I'd still love to feature you. So shout it out, put it on whatever podcast player you're going for. And I'm dying to hear your feedback on the show. 2:23 Okay, so now as we get into the benchmarking, first of all, LinkedIn does not publish their information about benchmarks, about averages. So it's really hard to actually tell if you're doing well or not. So if LinkedIn is not publishing this, that means someone else has to. Someone has to work from their limited data set. Well, we've managed hundreds of LinkedIn Ads accounts across every ad format, and about every industry that we can think through. So certainly 400 accounts as compared to the 10s of thousands that LinkedIn has. It's a small data sample size, but what we find is our benchmarks that we've found from our own clients. All of the accounts we've managed, overseen, even consulted on tend to be pretty accurate. So I wanted to share those with you, even if they are not a 100% representative. And I do wish that LinkedIn would publish their benchmarks, I would be happy if they came and smashed all of our data apart and proved it wrong. Since their data set is 100% complete, I would much rather be accurate than praised. So our limited data set seems to be more complete than anything we've seen out there. So I'm eager to share and a note on just the importance of benchmarking. If you don't know how you're doing, you won't be able to improve. And my biggest fear is that marketers who aren't in the know could be blindsided. There could be a situation where a marketer is complacent, thinking everything's fine. And then the account gets audited by someone where they point out a whole bunch of flaws or inefficiencies, and it could make the marketer look bad. So I think there's a need to gauge and be aware And be educated about the best things that you can do for your account for protection. So you can make sure that you don't get blindsided. It protects your job protects your reputation. And I also think because of that this is the most important episode for the show that we've come out with yet. 4:17 The metrics we're going to be benchmarking are going to be things like your click through rate, your cost per click, and your conversion rate. Those tend to be the unifying metrics that we see. Now, as we talk about each one of these, certainly each one individually is not the end all be all. For instance, when we report click through rate to clients, we constantly hear, okay, that's great and everything how often people are clicking on our ads, but that's not our goal. It doesn't tell us whether we're doing a good job or not. And certainly that is the case. Click through rate does not necessarily mean anything to our clients. But, it does mean something to us because it has a profound effect on the costs that you're going to get. If you're being smart on LinkedIn where you're bidding by the click, your click through rate really doesn't dictate much, because you're only paying when someone clicks anyway. So as long as you're spending your budget, everything should be fine. But when you're trying to improve when you realize that getting a higher click through rate can significantly lower your cost per click, then all of a sudden it starts to matter a lot. And conversion rates, this one's really important. But, certainly if you're not paying very much per click, then even if you had a low conversion rate, you might still be happy with your overall cost per conversion. Your conversion rate will vary depending on the level of perceived friction, and the level of perceived value in what you're asking someone to do. So if you're asking a lot of someone or asking something big from a cold audience, you're going to see a low conversion rate. And if you're offering something with a lot of perceived value, and it's perceived as being free, then you'll probably have a very high conversion. rate. So we'll go over the types of things that affect those. Like we talked about your cost per click will increase if your click through rates are bad. But we know that your cost per click is also going to be higher if you're going after extremely small audiences, or more competitive audiences. So these very much go hand in hand. If you have a low click through rate, you will be punished with really high cost per click, I get asked a lot about industry specific benchmarks and audience specific benchmarks. And what we've found is these benchmarks that we've defined, really don't change very much by industry, or really by audience. So if you're worried about your specific industry or your specific audience, don't worry, go ahead and take these benchmarks the same way they should still be pretty indicative. One of my early observations when I was using LinkedIn Ads was I had a campaign targeting manager level, another targeting director level, another targeting VP, and my last campaign targeting C level people. And in my mind, I hypothesized, well, of course, I'm going to pay more per click to reach the C level person than I would at the manager level. And what was so interesting is their cost per click, we're actually within about 30 cents of each other. And to add to the complexity here, the cost per click of the C level was 30 cents less than reaching the manager audience. So what this goes to show is your cost per click really doesn't change very much across personas, across industries. You're probably going to pay an average right now of about $8 to $11 per click, regardless of who it is. Now, this changes a little bit, because if you're going after the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, yeah, you're probably going to pay $15 or $20 per click. But in general, for audiences that aren't super, super tight and super in demand, you'll pay about the same Conversion rates and click through rates also tend to be quite similar in the same way. We do find elevated costs when we're trying to bid on enterprise sized companies. And that makes sense. They're quite a bit more competitive. When evaluating ad performance, I'm imagining two hurdles that our ads have to get over. The first hurdle is when we put up an ad, we need someone to click on it. And then once they've clicked on it, the second hurdle is we need them to convert. And based off of the efficiency metrics about how people are getting over the first and second hurdle, it lets us know what needs to be improved specifically. So we'll go over those efficiency metrics and how to actually audit your account here in a little bit. 8:44 First off definitions. We're going to be talking about, click through rates, which is the number of times people took action on your ad out of the number of times that people saw them. This will probably sound very elementary to many of you, but there's a reason that I'm going over the definitions because it's going to be important as we talk about sponsored messaging ads. 9:08 We're also going to be talking about conversion rates, which is the number of conversions out of the number of times that people took action and clicked on your ads. This usually is a form fill, but sometimes people have different definitions for what a conversion is. Okay, our two hurdles. So if you're having a hard time getting people to click on your ads, you will know because your click through rate will be low. And then if you're getting a lot of clicks, but you're just not seeing the leads or conversions happening, you'll know this because your conversion rate will be low. So figure out which of those two hurdles you're stumbling over. And then here at the end, we'll go over the actions that you can actually take to fix and rectify these. 9:50 Let's go over how to actually check out your performance. So you're logged into LinkedIn's campaign manager where you can see all of your different campaigns or maybe you're even at the ad level, you can see it there as well. Right above the list of campaigns, you'll see an option for columns. And if it's already selected with performance, then you're in a great place to see your click through rate and your cost per click. If you want to view your conversion rate, you have to select that columns and drop it down to where you can see leads and conversions. It's difficult because we can't customize the columns so we can see all of this on one page. So you will need to toggle back and forth as you're analyzing. It's very important for you to understand that when we talk about click through rate and cost per click, those metrics will be meaningful for every single type of ad, just as they're written in the ad platform. Except if you're using sponsored messaging, if you're using sponsored messaging, these metrics are lying to you, and you'll have to figure out a different way. We'll go over all that. But the reason why this is is because there's an extra step in the advertising process, when you're using sponsored messaging ads. We still have impressions, which is someone seeing the ad. But on sponsored messaging ads, that's a send, that means it was sent to someone, but not necessarily viewed. So we're departing from our definitions a little bit. The first action someone can take is opening it. And so LinkedIn calls an "open" a "click". And the average open rate of a sponsored messaging ad is like 50%. So if you're believing these metrics, as you're looking at them, sponsored messaging ads look really good. They're gonna have a 50% click through rate, looking at the dashboard. And your cost per click is also going to look really low because half of the people open it. LinkedIn is reporting to you that that's a click. So your cost per click quote, unquote, is usually just about twice the cost of your cost per send. So these look really good if you don't know the metrics you're looking at. You'll look at it going, "wow, we're paying less than $1 per click, and our click through rate is 50%". That's incredible. So keep in mind, these are definitely lying to you, the real click that you want to care about is in a different column. So we'll come to that as we covered sponsored messaging specifically. 12:19 But as of right now, let's talk a little bit about conversion rates, because these are quite a bit more unified. So there are two different types of conversions that we can have on LinkedIn Ads. If you are sending someone to a landing page that you own, there are a few steps. And the conversions that occur here are going to be called conversions in the ad platform. In order to get these conversions reporting, it takes four different steps. So the first is you have to take your insight tag, which is this little piece of tracking JavaScript from your account and install it on at least your homepage, your landing page, and your thank you page. Ideally, you have this on every page of the website, but just minimum of those three so that it will function. Next is you have to go into account assets and conversions, and actually set this conversion up. You have to tell LinkedIn, when someone lands on page x, that's called a conversion. And you let them know anytime this tag fires on that page, then yes, you now have a conversion. But it's not enough just to have it set up. Now you have to go and actually associate that conversion to the campaigns you're running. You can do that as you're setting up the conversion and just check every campaign in the account. Or you can go into your campaign settings and right at the very bottom of that campaign, you'll see an option to install conversion tracking. There are two different ways that you can track your conversions. You can either have someone land on a thank you page, so they fill out the form, you then redirect them to a separate page that says something like, thanks for giving us your info, we'll be in touch soon. Or here's a link to download that PDF that we were telling you about. And this is by far the easiest way to track your conversions. When you tell your webmaster that you need a separate URL thank you page, they're probably going to look at you like you were making a request from the 80s. This is a very old school way of doing it. But it is by far the best, it's the most reliable, and it's the most simple. Even without any coding knowledge, I can still troubleshoot issues on a thank you page. The other way though, is through an event tracking pixel. And this takes some pretty advanced understanding of JavaScript in order to do so as soon as we get into event tracking issues. I'm out I have to get our web developer involved. But this involves going on usually a button and then you set an event where as soon as someone clicks on the button to submit the form, then that's going to fire a piece of code back to LinkedIn. And they'll call that a conversion. Your web developer will understand this very well. But if it's you, as a marketer trying to set this up, you will likely do very, very well to just send it to a separate thank you page, because this event tracking solution is much more technical. Okay, so let's say you have this set up and you're driving conversions. If you go and look at LinkedIn's conversions column, that number is going to be wrong. It's going to be lying to you a little bit. The conversions column, which is the default column, that everything on LinkedIn uses, is actually a combination of two different things. There's something called click conversions, which is what we care about. And then there's also something called view through conversions. Now, a view through conversion feels like a lie to me, because all a view through conversion is is one of your ads had to show up as an impression to someone, and then they ended up converting because of a different channel. So I'll outline this for a situation that could have occurred. So a LinkedIn member is scrolling through their newsfeed, they scroll very quickly past an ad, they don't even see it. They don't even acknowledge it. And then they end up looking for a solution on Google, they click one of the PPC ads on Google end up converting. And now LinkedIn is going to report that as a conversion inside of LinkedIn ads. So if you are comfortable with slightly over reporting on the platform, then yeah, go ahead and use the conversions column. But we only report based off of click conversions, because that sure seems a lot more honest. Now there is a different kind of conversion altogether on LinkedIn. And that is when you're using lead generation forms. So one of the next episodes is all going to be about lead generation form ads. So stick around for that one. 12:19 But let's talk about what type of conversion you'll see come through. When you are running lead gen form ads, the native forms right within your ads, you won't see any metrics show up in the conversions columns, but there will be a column for leads. And there's also another column for lead form opens. The nice thing about lead generation forms is you don't actually have to set up anything for this. Because the conversion occurs on LinkedIn and LinkedIn understands it. They will just do all of the conversion tracking for you. There's no setting up pixels, there's no really anything you could do wrong to screw it up. Of course, the hard part with lead generation forms is you have to figure out how to get those leads out of LinkedIn by using an integration partner. 17:44 Okay, let's talk specifically about each ad format and what you can expect benchmarking wise. So starting with sponsored content, which is by far my favorite ad format, this encapsulates single image ads as well as carousel as well as video ads. The click through rate that we normally see, and LinkedIn actually even shares this information if you ask your rep. They see about a .4% click through rate on average. When we launch ads, according to our own conventions and strategies, we generally average between .8 and 1.2. So it's not difficult to outperform the average. But as long as you're over .4%, you're at least beating the average. If you're underperforming there, absolutely we'll talk about the things you can change. For costs per click, we expect sponsored content to land anywhere between about $8 to $11. If you're paying under that you're doing fantastic. If you're paying over about $11 a click, unless you are targeting a super small audience, or a really, really important enterprise level, like account based marketing list, you're probably bidding too high or bidding incorrectly. Then we get to the issue of conversion rates. I abbreviate this CVR. There's a little bit of a departure here based on what you're asking someone to do. So I split this into low friction offers and high friction offers. Low friction offers would be an example of like, here's a free piece of content that's really valuable, really interesting to you. And in exchange, all we're asking for is your contact info. If you're offering a low friction offer like that, we usually see between about 10 to 15% conversion rate, and anything over 15%, we call rockstar content and we want to go all in on that and generate as many conversions as we can while it's hot. But then you have high friction offers, like, hey, talk to our sales rep or buy something or take a demo or try a free trial of something. This is where of a cold audience, you're asking too much too soon. And because of that, people aren't going to be willing, or at least not as many people are going to be willing to take that actyion. So they'll click because they're interested or curious, but they will only convert between about 1.5% to 4%. Mostly on the lower end of that though, unless you're a big brand. 20:12 Okay, onto sponsored messaging. This includes both message ads, which used to be called sponsored in mail, and the new conversation ads. Like we talked about before, we have to add an extra metric in here. So we're going to talk about open rate. LinkedIn will call this click through rate, but that is absolutely not accurate. The average open rate is probably going to be about 50%. So if you have a 60% or a 70%, open rate, you know your subject line is rocking it. But then once someone opens, the next thing that you're going to want them to do is actually take action on something and click internally. Now click through rates are only between about three to 4% on average, and so if you have 7, 8, 9%, you have an amazing offer with great copy. If you do the math here with a 50%, open rate, a 3 to 4% click through rate and you're probably going to end up paying on a cost per send basis, anywhere between about 20 cents and 70 cents depending on how competitive that audiences. Your average cost per click is going to land somewhere between about $23 to $56. Now that is cost per click, remember I just told you that sponsored content, you'll average between $8 to $11. So what is sponsored messaging doing for you that it would be worth three to eight times as much. So yes, sponsored messaging is on average, the most expensive ad format on LinkedIn and because of that, you need to be really careful and really strategic about how you approach it. Since the costs are so high on average, we don't even recommend it to our average client. We only even suggest it to our clients when we think we can get 70% open rates, and 7% click through rates. That requires a very special type of offer. And certainly not everyone has it, it has to be a very personal type of offer. But if you can get this 70%, open rates and 7% click through rates, that will get your overall cost per click somewhere between about $4 and $14, depending on how much you paid. If your audience is uncompetitive, and you're paying 20 cents per send, it's around the $4 mark per click, which is great. That's half of what we would pay using sponsored content. But if you're paying 70 cents on the high side, then that turns out to be about a $14 cost per click. And if you want any more information on these ad formats, check out Episode 13 where we went really deep into those. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break and then we'll dive into the rest of the ad formats coming right up. 22:56 The LinkedIn Ads show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. 23:05 If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you be too linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We manage LinkedIn's largest accounts and we're the only media buying agency to be official LinkedIn partners. And performance to your goals is our only priority. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to get in touch and we'd absolutely love to help you demolish your goals. 23:29 Okay, let's jump into the other ad formats. So next coming up is text ads. Now most people who run text ads think that they're doing a bad job because the metrics look really bad, especially click through rate, but these are a hard ad to over perform or even underperform. So the average click through rate on these is .025%. So that's two and a half clicks out of every 10,000 impressions. Because these are only shown on desktop, and they're in the right rail, and they obviously look like ads, most people tend to be pretty banner blind to them, they ignore them. So if you have a click through rate over about .03%, you're doing amazing. Your ads are rock star level, keep it up. And this is LinkedIn's cheapest ad format. You can bid all the way to the floor of $2 if you want, but most of the time we see people paying between about $3 to $5 per click. So significantly cheaper than even sponsored content. But it's also really hard to drive a lot of this traffic unless you have a massive audience. If you're bidding higher, yeah, you can pay all the way up into like the $13 to $15 a click for these, but I probably wouldn't suggest it. You're really burning dollars at that point. 24:51 Okay, and then conversion rate. This totally depends on the offer. If you have a low friction or a high friction offer your conversion rate is going to vary significantly. But what we find is text ads because they come from people who are on a desktop, they have a full use of the keyboard, you can generally get higher quality leads here, you can generally get a slightly higher conversion rate, because they don't feel as bad about typing more fields that they might feel bad about on a mobile device, doing lots of thumb typing. And you can usually get them to fill out more fields. So text ads conversions we love. Then you've got dynamic ads. Now one ad unit of dynamic ads takes up the space of three text ads. Because of that, you'll see click through rates that are equal to about three times the average click through rate of text ads. So if you're performing over a .06 percent click through rate, you're doing great. We oftentimes see .08, .09, even as high as .1 in some cases. Now your cost per click here, it used to be that you'd pay $13 to $18 per click on these, but LinkedIn had a recent price reduction, like we've talked about in Episode 13. And because of that, the cost per click now is usually between about $6 to $8 per click. Because the click through rate is low like text ads. Again, this is an ad format that's really hard to get a lot of traffic from. So fight the temptation to bid so high that you're paying over about the $8 mark, because you can probably pay $8 per click on sponsored content and capture a lot more traffic. Just like text ads, your conversion rate on dynamic ads totally depends on the perceived value and the perceived friction of that offer. Okay, so you're saying to yourself, I found some areas, identified some metrics that are not as good as they should be. So if my performance sucks, how do I go and fix it? Let's focus first on your click through rate. So if your click through rate is below the benchmarks that I've laid out here, it's probably one of four things. The first is maybe your ad copy isn't showing the value of your offer properly. Number two is maybe your image is not contrast enough to get people to stop scrolling. Remember, your images job is just to be a thumb stopper. Don't try to convert someone from the image. That's the job of your ad copy. So on to the point three here, your ad copy might not be pressing on your pain point hard enough. You might be saying, here's what you can get, but maybe you're not telling them, "hey, you have a problem. This is going to solve it". And your fourth is, and this is usually my last resort, it could be that your offer simply isn't interesting. And there's no amount of ad copy rewriting you can do to make your offer seem interesting enough to get over that first hurdle, which is getting someone to click. So if you're under these, click through rate benchmarks, try refreshing your ad copy, try saying it in a different way, try selling that offer a little bit better and see if you can get that up. We'll get you sailing over hurdle number one, and then getting towards hurdle number two. Okay, but what if you're paying too much? What if your costs per click are significantly higher than what I've laid out here? If you go back to Episode 6 where we talked about bidding and budgeting, the first reason the biggest reason why people are paying too much, it's because they're bidding too high, or they're bidding wrong. So don't take LinkedIn's advice on how to bid here, definitely use the strategy I laid out in Episode 6. The next reason why you might be paying so much though, is maybe you have bad click through rates, which we just went over. So improve those things. If you can get your click through rate higher, your cost per click will come down. The third reason your cost per click might be too high is really something you can't do very much about and it's if competition is just so high. If you're in an area where competition is ridiculous, and you're paying like $13, $15 a click and you just can't get traffic at less than that, what you'll want to do is play with different offers and play with different ad creative. Because if you can get your click through rate up significantly, that will get your cost per click down. And all you have to do is outperform your competitors in the auction by getting a higher click through rate, awarding you a higher relevancy score, and then LinkedIn will let you start getting traffic at lower bids. 29:26 Okay, and finally, conversion rate, this is the second hurdle. So you're getting a lot of traffic, you're getting people clicking, but you're not seeing a lot of conversions. There are lots of things that can affect your conversion rate. Let's go through each of those. Very first off, most of the time, it's your offer. If you're telling someone give us your personal information. If someone's going to be willing to give you that information, that better be good, it better be worth their time and potentially opening themselves up to getting spam. So don't try to give them a product brochure. Don't try to offer them something like a white paper from eight years ago. It has to be interpreted as valuable, otherwise they're not going to convert. Okay, so assuming you have an offer that people actually would care about that is exciting is perceived as valuable. If you're still not converting, maybe it's because your ad didn't prep them well enough when they got to that form. So if the ad is telling them, here's the pain point, here's the value that you're going to get by moving forward here. And then they get to the landing page. It could be that your ad didn't prep them well enough to convert. So maybe the landing page itself is saying fill out this form, and we'll give you this but maybe the ad didn't tell them that there was going to be a form on the other side. Maybe the ad didn't give them a call to action. It just said, "hey, you've got this problem, click here to solve it". And then when they get to the page, they're disappointed because it's asking for their information and it feels like a bait and switch to them. Then there are lots of things about the landing page that could be wrong here. So maybe your landing page doesn't instill trust. You could have all of the right stuff on your landing page, it could look good, but if for some reason someone is looking at it going, oh, I've never heard of this company before, this could be shady, you could have all the right elements, but your conversion rate would be next to nothing and you wouldn't know why. So make sure you concentrate on those trust signals. Put badges and here are the customers we've worked with. And here's where we've been featured. That type of information will help instill that trust and get people to move forward. Sometimes the landing page doesn't have all the right stuff, and maybe it's hindering your conversion. Imagine what happens when someone goes to click on your ad. And then your page takes three, four or five seconds to come up and load. You're not sticking around and neither is your prospect. So sometimes here it's a page load speed issue. So make sure your landing pages are loading fast. So you don't lose people before they even get there. Maybe your form comes first, but you didn't actually sell the offer well enough. There's no text telling them here's the value, here's the benefit to you. So make sure that you lead with the value. By reading this PDF, you will learn X, Y, and Z, you will be able to do A. The three things that we really want to see on a landing page. Number one, we want the form to be front and center. So as soon as the page loads, people are in the mindset, you're going to be asking something of me and I'm in that mindset. Number two, you want the text telling them here's the value, here's the benefits to you. Third, you want these trust signals. You want something telling them instilling that trust. And if you have all three of those things, but you're still not converting, chances are you're asking too much. Your offer isn't actually valuable, which hurts to hear, but maybe you are just not providing as much value as you thought you were. Or maybe the offer is pretty good. But your landing page is asking for too much stuff. If you're asking for more than like four, maybe five fields, people are going to look at that. And even if they are interested, they're going to say, they're asking for my social security number and a license to my firstborn. I, this just isn't worth it, and they'll leave. So try to keep your form fields down to preferably first name, last name, email converts the highest, you may have to ask for phone number. So one cool little hack here is, as of recently, LinkedIn allowed the lead gen form ads to pass someone's profile URL from a field. And what's so cool about this is if you have access to their profile URL, you don't need to ask them things like what their job title is, or what company they work for, or what industry they're in, or what their company size is. You don't have to ask that because It's all available on their public LinkedIn profile. So as my little hack here, if I'm using lead gen forms, I will ask for first name, last name, email, and profile URL. People tend to convert nicely on this because you asked them for a profile URL and they say, well, it's public knowledge Anyway, why do I care, but it has all of the other information that you want to extract and your sales team is going to appreciate a very quick way to look them up and see how to approach them. So your job now, I want you to go take a look at all of your different ad formats and their performance, compare them to the benchmarks, and then figure out are you having trouble over hurdle one, two, maybe even both, or maybe you're looking at this going oh, I'm having trouble over no hurdles. And that's great. I hope that you are just killing it and slaying it. But, if you are stumbling over one of those hurdles, I do hope this information has been super helpful for you. I do want to add just one little thing based off of the conversion rate factors. There is a cool way that you can actually test your landing pages to see if your landing page is hindering the conversion or if it's the offer. So if I'm running traffic to a landing page, and I'm having a low conversion rate, but I feel like my offers good, what I will do is run exactly the same ad to the exact same audience. But instead, I'm going to test it through a lead generation form. And the difference here is that a lead gen form is filled out right on LinkedIn, where all the trust signals are already there, and the speed is there. So if you're seeing a 2% conversion rate from your landing page, but you see a 15% conversion rate from your lead gen forms for exactly the same thing, that is a screaming signal that wow, your landing page is hindering conversions and you need to fix that landing page, whether it's speed, whether it's the right elements, whether it's selling the asset better on it, something's wrong with that landing page. But, if you do this test, and maybe you had a 2% conversion rate on the landing page, but a 5% conversion rate from your lead gen form, then you know it's probably the offer. People just aren't willing to download what it is that you're offering them. So that's time to do some more work on the offer. Okay, with that being said, I've got all the episode resources for you coming right up, so stick around. 36:26 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 36:36 Okay, I mentioned at the beginning about the benchmarks video that I did with Social Media Examiner. It's on YouTube so hit that link in your show notes. This is an 11 minute video that goes over a very condensed version of what we've talked about here. So if someone is not a podcast listener, but you need them to understand benchmarks, send them that video. They'll watch it and go, "oh, great. You're right. We should change our landing page" or whatever you're trying to get them to do. Use that as a tool to help convince. The next is when I present on LinkedIn Ads, I have a slide all about benchmarks. And so I'm going to put that as a JPEG that you can just click on and download it, you can use this as an easy reference. Just print it off, put it up in your office, or I don't know, make it your desktop background or something. But this will help you have a reference guide. So you don't have to go back and listen to this and take notes. If you are new, or if you have an employee who is new to LinkedIn Ads, have them check out the course link. This is the LinkedIn Learning course that I did with LinkedIn Learning. And it covers about the first hour and a half of what I train, when teams bring me in. I charge $500 an hour for consulting. And this course is only $25 if you have to buy it, or if you have LinkedIn premium of any kind, you'll have access to it for free. So a very, very good deal for anyone who wants to learn more about LinkedIn Ads. It takes you from absolutely nothing to all the basics. Open up your podcast player right now and hit the subscribe button whichever podcast player you're using, I want you to subscribe. I hope I've provided enough value that you'll want to keep listening. I have so many cool plans for episodes coming up. So I want you to be ready for those. And then please, if you do like what you're listening to, please hit a review, give it a rating and leave us a review. I'd love to shout you out in the review segment. And then finally, if you have any ideas for what you would like us to cover here on the podcast, or if you have questions, feel free to reach out to Podcast@B2Linked.com and we will help you out as fast as possible. Okay, see you back here next week. And we are cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources: LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course Dayparting Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Show Transcript: Are you ultra limited on budget and not sure if LinkedIn Ads will be a good channel for your company? Then this strategy is for you. 0:13 Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. 0:21 Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! People reach out to us all the time asking, saying things like, "hey, I've heard your recommendation for making sure that we have at least $5,000 a month for budget, but I just don't have that much money or my boss, I just can't convince him or her to do it". Well, you're in luck. Today, we're going through exactly the lowest budget strategy is to test out LinkedIn Ads as a platform that we've found. 0:46 Let's hit it. So as for the news, LinkedIn has reported that they've seen an 8% weekly increase in posting on pages, which is pretty exciting. I've been asked by several people during the COVID crisis, "what's happening to organic usage of LinkedIn? Is it going up? Is it going down?" And there are a couple stats here that LinkedIn has released to us partners letting us know that yeah, it sure seems like usage is increasing. The first stat here is that weekly posting of pages is up 8%, which is fantastic. That means more people posting for whatever reasons, maybe they're trying to get additional business or they're trying to just connect with people, either way, and 8% increase in posting on pages is awesome. And at a partnership conference last year with LinkedIn, one of the senior executives at LinkedIn told us that creating in the newsfeed was up 40% year over year, and that was fantastic knowing that people are just spending more time in the newsfeed and they're posting. We just found that the statistic now is that year over year increase in creation of posts in the newsfeed is up 60% this year, so wow, I thought 40% was huge last year now at 60. It gives me a lot of hope for the future for where I see organic usage of the platform going. And what's so exciting to me about the organic increase is the more people who are using the platform organically, the more ad inventory is created for us to use. So I think they really go hand in hand. I wanted to highlight a few reviews that we've gotten just on the podcast. Thank you guys so much for reviewing the podcast. Like I've been asking for the last few episodes. Thank you so much for reviewing the podcast in your individual podcast players. I wanted to just say thank you and shout out to a few people who've reviewed so far. "There's this one excellent podcast packed with value. AJ is the go to resource for all things LinkedIn ads. Thank you for this great podcast." That one's by Greg Tosi. Greg, thanks so much for leaving that. The next one "Ain't nobody no LinkedIn ads like AJ. Not only does AJ know his stuff, when it comes to LinkedIn, but he's entertaining and does a great job making things easy to understand to boot. If you are considering running LinkedIn Ads or scaling existing campaigns, then this is the podcast you need to be listening to". That one's by Tucker Stoffers. Tucker, thank you. I know you. I know how great you are at Facebook ads, at Google ads, and even LinkedIn. So thank you, that means a ton to me. The next one, "the OG of LinkedIn Ads, AJ pulls back the curtain on LinkedIn Ads and doesn't hold anything back. He speaks from real world experience, not repeated secondhand information. AJ is the authority on LinkedIn's advertising platform". That's by George Krahn. George, thank you so much for the kind words. Seriously, these mean the world to me. I put in hundreds of hours into this podcast so far, and I want to make sure that it doesn't join the graveyard of podcasts out there. So we're gonna keep going. Thank! Every kind word, every review that you leave, helps me keep going. Alright, so let's jump into it strategies here. We know that LinkedIn as a platform is expensive. And we know that the traffic really reacts and acts like more of a top of funnel type of traffic. And on top of that, the user interface really isn't all that kind. And there's a pretty steep learning curve to all of it. So of course, testing out LinkedIn Ads can feel really daunting to someone, because I think you're wary of screwing something up on the platform. And of course, any mistake you make on an expensive platform becomes an expensive mistake. So follow these steps to ensure that you're properly evaluating the channel at its very best. And I read a bumper sticker one time that said, "If you can't handle me at my worst, you don't deserve me at my best". So my recommendation here is and this is what you'll feel from all of these recommendations, test out the channel at its very best so that you can see if it's worth expanding and increasing your volume to see not that you're going for the worst. But,see if it's even worth it at its best to consider it and expanding the program. 5:05 For any sort of test on social media, I use the acronym AMO. And it stands for your audience, your message, and your offer. Now, these are the three things that you need in order to have any sort of an ad happening on social media. And so what you're looking for at very first of any campaign is you want AMO alignment. You want to know whether you're reaching the right audience with the right message in the right way. And without testing, you won't actually know any of this for sure. But give this a shot with your best gut guesses and then you can start testing from there. On the audience side, don't worry about not fitting every potential prospect in your I'm giving you permission to be ultra picky about who your audience is, in your targeting. Then your message, you want to take your best shot at what you think motivates your audience to click and then convert. You may not have this fully dialed in yet, but give it a shot. And then your offer, you've got a couple different directions you can go here. You can either try what we call a bottom of the funnel offer, where you're saying something "like, click on this ad, this is what we do, click here to talk to our sales department or click here for a demo". And you can try that out about 95% of the time, that type of offer fails. But maybe you're in the 5% that this can work. So if that's what you're trying, I would say your risks are pretty low. Because if you're only paying when someone clicks, if you have an offer, that's not interesting, the worst thing that can happen is that no one clicks and LinkedIn just kind of shuts it off. And it didn't cost you very much except for your time. Of course, those who do click it will be a pretty expensive cost per click. But all in all, it's a pretty low cost kind of test. So sure, go ahead and try that first. 7:00 If you are going the content route though, which I recommend the vast majority of the time, go take a look at your analytics and find what is your best performing content offer. Look specifically at the conversion rates that you see on your various offers, or come up with something that you think is going to be far and away the most valuable thing that your audience could have. Diving into more detail to your audience here. You want to keep your audience to the very most core. Of course, you could get business from a lot of different industries or roles, but just keep it to the ones that you know are a perfect hit. And then of course, once you've tested the very most core, the people who very most feel the pain of what you solve. Sure, you can always expand to their colleagues, their bosses, other decision makers, but start with just the ones that you know are feeling the pain. Then with your offers, if you're using a content offer, look for conversion rates that are over 15%. That will tell you that this is a rockstar offer that people want and really appreciate. And if you're using a bottom of funnel type of offer, realize that you're probably going to see in the long term, conversion rates between 1.5 to 4%. So this is very low, which means if you're using a bottom of the funnel offer, look for any conversions. Any conversions within the first few days is going to tell you that yes, it really seems like there's something of value here for them. Early on, the signs that you're watching for, you're very first looking for high or low click through rates. Because your click through rate is in effect going to tell you whether your audience is interested at all in what you're offering. If no one clicks on the ads, you're obviously not presenting them with a value that they care about. If it's a sponsored content newsfeed ad, watch for click through rates in excess of .4% because .4% is about the average. And so you know, if you're performing above that, you're doing something right. And if you're doing something right, that tells you that you have some alignment in your ammo, your audience, your message, and your offer are doing something here. And of course, at low budget with very few clicks, you may or may not get conversions along the way, you probably won't. So the first little bit, you're looking just for click through rates, and then as soon as you get enough clicks, that you start to see conversions. That's when you can really start to make a determination about whether or not your offer is converting. Okay, as for ad formats, I would recommend using sponsored content first, because these show up in the newsfeed. Now I would recommend there are lots of different variants of sponsored content. I would recommend the single image version first, because it's the easiest to troubleshoot. So realize that sponsored content is the most versatile ad format out there and will probably give you the most traffic. But bids, if you take them all the way to the floor, you'll probably still spend between $4 to $6. At least in North America. So if you're working with budgets between let's say $2,000 to $5,000 per month, then sponsored content is a probably a great way to go. However, if you are working with ultra low budgets, I had someone reach out this morning and say that they were trying to spend $300 a month on ads, then you really only have one option. And that's using text ads. Because text ads, you can take them all the way down to the bid floor of $2. So think of this as just dipping your toe in the water. You just want some traffic from LinkedIn to see how it works. Because text ads only have a click through rate of about .025%. Again, that's two and a half clicks out of every 10,000 times they're shown. You really need to have a pretty large audience for this to really spend any money at all. However, if you're just trying to spend $300 for the month, you can definitely do that off of pretty much any audience size that you want. Text ads are also very, very easy to troubleshoot. Because there's only two things you have, well, I guess technically three, you have a little 50 x 50 pixel image. Sometimes it's 100 x 100. You have a 25 character headline, and a 75 character ad line. So if it's not working, you know you get to adjust one of those three things to make it work. Whatever you do, no matter how sexy they look, avoid sponsored messaging ads at all costs here, because sponsored messaging ads are LinkedIn's highest risk and oftentimes most expensive ad format. 11:47 Okay, what about bidding strategy? We've talked a little bit about how we're bidding by cost per click. We've talked about how we're going to be at the floor, but let's go into a little bit more detail here. When you very first create your first campaign on LinkedIn. LinkedIn's defaults will set a whole bunch of different things. They will set you to automated bidding, which is what you don't want. You want to change automated bidding, to cost per click or CPC, whatever you're doing, go and find the CPC version of that. And that's because it takes away your risk as an advertiser, you're now only going to pay when someone clicks, as opposed to paying every time your ad gets shown, and really removing that whole issue where you're going to pay even if people aren't actually interested in your ad. The next thing you want to do is LinkedIn will tell you a price range that they suggest you bid at. But just ignore that entirely. You're not interested in the bottom of the range, you're interested in the floor price, that means the very minimum that LinkedIn will let you pay. Because on low budgets, it does not make sense to set high bids. You will blow your entire month's budget In just a few clicks, and you don't want that. You won't learn anything and then you'll feel robbed. So what you do is you go to that bid, that maximum CPC field, and you go and enter in $1, and then click away. LinkedIn will then pop up in red lettering saying, oh, the minimum bid for this audience is actually and then they'll tell you a number like $4.75 or $6.26. Now, you know, the absolute floor, the very minimum that LinkedIn will let you bid for traffic. And if you can fill your entire budget, at that level of bid, then you just won, you just spent your entire budget at the very cheapest cost per click for your ideal audience. Now there is a chance depending on your ad, if it's if it's not interesting or it's not providing a whole lot of value, there's a good chance that you'll have to increase your bids to start spending enough but at least this gets you started out on the right foot. And only increase your bids if you aren't getting enough traffic to actually spend what you want to spend. And then of course, only increase your daily budget, if you're hitting the budget. If your budget is $10 a day, which is the minimum, and you're only spending on average $3 a day, then it's okay, you can leave your daily budgets at $10 because you're not hitting them. But if you look and see that you're spending on average $10 every single day, you know that that audience is hungry for what it is you're doing. And you could spend more if you want, and of course, make any changes you want later. You don't have to cement yourself into a bidding or a budgeting strategy yet, you can always change those things in the future. 14:50 Okay, here's a quick sponsor break and then we will dive into the targeting 15:00 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 15:10 B2Linked is the LinkedIn Ads focused agency. We manage many of Lincoln's largest spending accounts worldwide, and are official LinkedIn partners. Contact us on B2Linked.com to get in touch, and our team can help you enact these and other strategies to help get you the very best performance on your ads. 15:28 All right, now let's jump into the targeting aspect. As you're trying out LinkedIn's targeting, I would recommend you use job title targeting along with your ideal company size, and or industry here. And job title I recommend because it's so tight, you can get so specific around who someone is. And if you're only going to be spending a limited amount of money here. You might as well spend it on exactly the right people. There's not leaving anything to chance. If your product or service is expensive, where you know, only certain sizes of companies would be able to purchase it, then make sure you segment to exactly the right company size. And don't be afraid to segment down to individual industry as well. Because you may say I'm going after, let's say, HR reps, maybe decision makers, director and above. But you may decide, oh, if I had someone come in from the arts industry, or if it was an ad agency, it wouldn't make sense. So go ahead and use industry to make sure you're hitting the exact right people. Because on low budget, you don't want to waste a dime. You might also consider doing what we call account based marketing here, and that is targeting only specific companies. If you have a list, like this list is the most qualified buyers are the most likely to purchase from us. Yeah, go ahead and target just the companies that you know would be a good thing. for you. If you do target by exact account, though, I would recommend get away from the job title targeting that I recommended before, and instead use something broader, like skill or job function, and probably attach onto it a seniority layer as well because job title targeting is really tight. So if you have a list of just companies, and then you add job titles on top of that, you're probably going to have an audience that is too small even to advertise. Or if it's not, you might just not be able to spend your budget even if it is small. Remember that we're hoping to test our very most likely to be valuable here. So don't worry that there is someone who could purchase your product or might be interested who fits outside of your targeting. That's okay. Right now you're going for just the core just the people who are feeling the most pain. And of course, you can always expand later as it's successful. We had a client who sold only to IT decision makers, in companies with 50 or more employees. But they told me in the course of advertising, that their ideal audience was actually those in the 500 to 1000 range. So because we were just testing and starting, we went ahead and changed our targeting to just 500 to 1000. So they were bringing in the highest grade prospects. And as soon as we saw success, we went ahead and lowered all the way down to the 50 person and above companies. But we started out with the most core. 18:37 So let's talk about timing, because I get asked all the time when I mentioned that I suggest budgets of over $5,000 a month for LinkedIn Ads, and people go, "ah, but what time period do I have to spend that $5,000 over? Is that a month? Is that a day is that six months?" And what I want to remind you here, we're generating this data for data and now analysis. So it doesn't necessarily matter that it's over a particular period of time, it just has to be enough data to actually analyze. So whether this is spent over the course of two days, or over six months, the data will be relatively the same with one caveat that if you're running ads over some serious seasonality, like over Q4 in December, when people are checked out and getting ready for for Christmas and New Year's and the holidays, or if you're advertising over a crisis like COVID that we're going through right now, then, yeah, I think user behavior will change over time. But for right now, I would say if it takes you six months to spend that much money, great, go ahead and do it because this is a long term play. You're in this for the long haul. Make sure that you just get enough data to make sure you know whether or not it's working. Okay, so I mentioned about budgets that I see suggests budgets of $5,000 a month or more. But of course, it's possible to advertise at lower budgets. So let's talk about what you need to keep in mind as you're doing this. So here's the amount of data that you need for each type of analysis, we find that we usually have to spend about $1,000 advertising before we can get statistical significance around our click through rates. So that means if our goal is to find out what sort of message is most engaging, we can do that after about $1,000 in spend. And if we have a content type offer something like download this free ebook or guide or checklist, we usually have to spend about $5,000 before we get statistical significance around the cost per conversion, and around conversion rates. That means if you're spending less than those amounts, it means you just have to spend for more months. And until you spend that much money, you will likely not know whether or not it's working. Of course, if it is totally hitting it out of the park, like you have the lowest cost per conversion you've ever seen. Yeah, even if you haven't spent that much money, maybe the programs working great. And you may spend that much money and have zero conversions. So you might tell yourself, okay, maybe this isn't working for me. But if you're really anywhere in between, you probably need to spend more money to have confidence that this is working. Remember, this is a marathon, it's not a sprint, and you need to be in this for the long haul. So don't call the test early if you're spending $300 a month, because it's going to take lots of months to get a large enough data sample size, to have any sort of significance. And of course, you might be really lucky and close a massive deal after $300 in ad spend. Or you might be equally as unlucky and not see anything come from that. So side with statistical significance here and make sure you have a large enough sample size that when you analyze it, it's enough to actually be meaningful. It usually takes 100 clicks before we're starting to look at conversions at all. And it usually takes 20, 30 conversions before we're looking at that to try to assess lead quality as well. So adjust your expectations for how fast this is going to happen. There are some default options that LinkedIn will select for you when you're building a campaign. The first is audience expansion. And what this is, is you tell LinkedIn who your audience is, and then you check a box. And then LinkedIn will go and find more people that they think are closely associated. Now it sounds like a good idea. But remember, what we said here is that you're going after the exact audience who's feeling the pain, and you don't want to leave anything up to interpretation by LinkedIn, either algorithmically or of course, they're not going to be putting things in manually. So make sure you uncheck that box. You don't want any traffic outside of the exact audience that you're selecting here, Then if it's sponsored content as an ad, one option you have is called LinkedIn Audience Metwork or LAN. And this is actually pretty cool. But what it is, is the ability for your ads to show up to the right people, even when they're not on LinkedIn. So maybe they're flipping through the Flipboard app, while they're checking out their news, they could see one of your ads there, or maybe they're on the homepage of Wall Street Journal, and maybe they see your ad there as well. What's nice about LAN is your cost per click overall will come down, because those placements cost less. But in this test that I'm recommending to you, I would say you want to make sure that all of your traffic is in exactly the right and same mindset so that you can analyze it properly. And if someone comes from a site that is not LinkedIn, you don't know what mindset they're in. So I would uncheck that box and make sure that if you get 30 clicks, you know, all 30 of those came from people who are on LinkedIn, which means they were thinking about their job or their career and making them better. Another big problem for small budgets is they are oftentimes spent during the middle of the night. So let me explain to you how this works. LinkedIn bases all of their timing off of the Greenwich Mean Time, or Universal Time, that's in the UK. So that means here in North America, I'm in the Mountain Time Zone, and I'm six hours behind that. 24:36 So that means that when I have an account that hits its full budget for the day, it then becomes eligible to show again, at like 6pm for me. So that means a small budget where you're going to fill the entire budget if you get, you know, two, three clicks, is starting at 6pm the night before and it's likely going to be spent by the time that someone comes comes into the office at like 7am and starts actually being ready to convert. So you're getting traffic during the worst time of the night, when people are not going to convert, you're just getting the night owls and insomniacs. It's not the traffic you want. Now, there are services that will do this for you. But chances are, you're probably not going to invest $500 per month or more for a tool when your ad budget is small anyway. So I would recommend go ahead and plan on manually turning your campaign group on and off during business hours and after business hours, just to make sure that your budget is spent during the most valuable part of the day. And we are going to have a whole episode about day parting in the next couple months. So watch for that topic, because this whole thing will go a lot deeper and B2Linked is actually coming out with a tool to help people do this that will have a freemium version. So watch for that. Make sure you are actually you know, turning things on, turning things off manually right now. So you can take advantage of the best part of the day, and then realize that at some point we'll have a tool and we can bail you out. Okay to recap, I want you to focus in on your most core audience with the offer that you expect to be the most successful to them. Clean your audience targeting out of anything that could muddy the waters like audience expansion, or audience network. Make sure you're bidding by cost per click to start out with to take away the risk and bid the very minimum, not what LinkedIn says is the minimum, but the actual floor minimum and only raise your bids if you're not getting the traffic that you need or enough of it. And finally, run your ads only during the most successful parts of the day to make sure that you're not wasting all of your budget to just the night owls who aren't going to convert and make good leads for you. Okay with that I've got great episode resources coming up for you. So stick around. 27:08 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 27:17 All right, as for resources, make sure you sign up for the B2Linked newsletter so that you can know when we come out with our day parting or ad scheduling tool. I'm sure this will be super helpful so that you don't have to manually turn things off and on again. Believe me, I did it for years. If you're just dipping your toe into the water, you are going to love our LinkedIn ads course that we launched on LinkedIn Learning. There's a link right in the show notes down below. So check that out. Also look at your podcast player right now and make sure you hit the subscribe button so you can continue hearing episodes like this. If LinkedIn Ads are important to you, you are going to love this content. And please rate and review the podcast on whatever player you listen. I would love to highlight your reviews and give you a shout out. So make sure you do it and watch for your name being shouted out on a future podcast. If you've got any ideas for shows, or any questions, feel free to reach out, Podcast@B2Linked.com. We'd love to hear your feedback on how to improve the whole show. We'll see you back here next week. And we're cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

  Show resources: Cities that tanked and others that didn't with jobs from covid. LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course Video ad specs Carousel ad specs Single image ad specs Text ad specs Message ads specs Conversation ad specs Dynamic ad specs Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Transcript: Four different ad formats with 10 plus variations. No wonder y'all are confused about how to create LinkedIn ads. Let's get it. 0:13 Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. 0:20 Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. So you guys ask me all the time about the different ad formats on LinkedIn? Which one should I use? Which one performs best? We're going to go into all the pros and cons of each one, and which situations to use them in. So we're going to hit it. But first, let's talk about the news. Obviously, this is going to roll out a little bit later because I record a little bit earlier. But COVID-19 is all throughout the news. So I wanted to share a little bit about how people are talking about COVID and how people are using LinkedIn because of it. LinkedIn, let me know that 33% of the posts right now are related to Coronavirus or COVID-19. And then of course topics like remote working, social distancing, those things have definitely seen at least made a showing in the types of content being shared. There's been a 19% increase in the number of posts about remote work, 8% increase in social distancing, 6% of additional posts on online collaboration. So definitely, we see a whole bunch more. What else was interesting though, to me is that we're seeing the hashtag #webinar as one of the fastest growing hashtags. And I think this definitely signals the need for brands to move to virtual events. So more people are doing webinars and virtual events and talking about them. It definitely seems like smaller companies are the ones getting involved, because those companies with 1 to 200 employees are the ones driving the increase in posting, whereas enterprises are actually posting a little bit less, they're only down about 1% pre-COVID. But you know, even with that, you figure the bigger enterprises are probably being disrupted more and pulling back and maybe the more nimble, smaller organizations are deciding to, you know, this is the time to speak up. One cool article I'll share in the show notes is called as US hiring skids, Atlanta and five other cities fight back. And it's a really cool article where LinkedIn's economic graph team actually did some research based off of who's hiring and who's not in the largest metropolitan areas. And there's a really cool graph in here where they show pre-COVID, especially what hiring rates looked like. And then afterwards, you can see, surprise, surprise from the title of the article, Atlanta is doing really well. But you'll want to jump on and check out and see how did Atlanta do compared to Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, New York, and San Francisco. Some other really cool stats here on posting, LinkedIn says that there has been an 8% increase in weekly posting on pages. So companies, like we said, are getting more involved. There's been a 10% increase in content shared by pages, so definitely more more active in the feed just doing more 16% increase in lead gen campaigns. And then of course, you wouldn't be too surprised to hear that there's been a 78% increase in Coronavirus related videos. 26% increase in original posts with video. So just people are sharing more video right now. And then a 13% increase in thought leadership. And there's been a 13% increase in sharing industry news from third party articles. Something else really cool. This is you're going to hear this two weeks after we found out about it. But LinkedIn just barely this week released two new types of targeting. One of the new targeting is called company category. So you get to it by going to company and then company category. And there's a whole bunch in here of different types of company categories. You can target many having to deal with Fortune or Forbes. So there's Forbes fastest growing companies. There's Fortune 500 companies, which is something we've been asking for for a long time, this is great. LinkedIn's news editors actually have their own list of top companies by country. And so you can use these classifications to make sure you're hitting just the very fastest growing the very largest companies on the planet. It's awesome for those who are especially in the enterprise. But then the one that I'm actually arguably more interested in is called company growth rate. Now, you access this one the same way you go to company and then company growth rate. And there are options here like 0% to 3%, company growth, 3% to 10%, company growth 10% to 20%. And then 20% and above. You can actually even target negative growth companies, so those who are pulling back on the reins. Now, immediately when I saw this, I was asking, okay, how did LinkedIn get this data? Because it can't be by company size. Because if you look at just the company size buckets that LinkedIn has 1 to 10 or 11 to 50, 51 to 200, etc, just bumping from the next bucket up, you'd be looking at growth rates in the 60 to 90% range. So we know that LinkedIn is not pulling this from the data recorded by company page admins, as they are increasing their company sizes. And this is actually really good because if you relied on people to give just that data, I think it would be largely inaccurate. Company page admins just don't go in to update their company sizes all that often. But then I started thinking about it. LinkedIn, can actually know how big your company is based off of how many employees are adding them as an employer. So this is data that LinkedIn doesn't give us. But every new employee who comes to work for you can go and set you as their employer and LinkedIn sees this data. And this goes all the way down to a granularity of one. So even if you're in an industry where, let's say only 30% of your employees are even on LinkedIn, it doesn't matter. LinkedIn is calculating here a percent growth or percent change. And so as long as you know, one or two or three people come in and associate themselves to your company page and say they work for you, LinkedIn can see that growth, which I think is awesome. All right, now let's get down to the individual ad formats on LinkedIn. And we'll go through the pros and cons and all of that good stuff. We're going to start out with my favorite, which is sponsored content. Now, there are several different variations of sponsored content. So we'll cover each one. But here are the basics of just all types of sponsored content. You can expect about 80 plus percent of your traffic to come from mobile devices, because your sponsored content comes in the newsfeed and the majority of feed users are mobile. The homepage experience both on desktop and mobile is to dump you right into the feed. So you will see a lot of interaction there. We expect somewhere around 0.4% click through rate, so a little bit under half a percent. And we generally expect to see a cost per click anywhere between about $8 to $11. The floor though is variable. So that what that means is for one audience, you might bid all the way down and find out that your floor is $5 and 50 cents. And then for a different audience, you might find that it's $6 and 27 cents or something like that. So you just have to find that floor by just reducing your bids until LinkedIn screams at you and tells you what the floor is. 7:35 So then we start looking at single image ads, which is, again, my very favorite version of sponsored content, because it's the simplest, it's the least risky. I ended up recommending this type of ad format to about 95% of advertisers. It's such a great starter ad format, because it's so simple to troubleshoot. It's made up of really three elements. There's text up Above at the top of the ad, which is called intro text, and that's by far the most important piece. Then you have a big beautiful image that's 1200 pixels wide by 627 tall. And then down below, you have a headline. Now for your intro, you want to make sure that you keep it under about 150 characters for that intro, so that it doesn't truncate and show the See More link. For the headline down below, keep it under about 70 characters and a little bit less if you want to make sure it doesn't get truncated on mobile. Our ideal we found if we keep it under about 130 characters for the intro and about 60 for the headline, we tend to see better performance, but certainly your mileage may vary here. 8:45 Then the next variation here is carousel ads. Now I recommend carousel ads about zero percent of the time and the reason why is because there there are a lot of work to create. You have to use a different image size and you can have up to 10 cards in an ad, but creating each card, you have to have your own unique, visual creative, and it gets its own headline. So if I had to create a carousel ad with four cards in it, it would be about the same amount of work as creating four separate single image ads. So it's a lot harder to create it, it's more effort. And for that effort, I don't see us getting rewarded very much. There doesn't seem to be a huge increase in performance, and there's certainly no reduction of cost. So I don't end up recommending this very often, unless you have visual creative that tells a really interesting story in these tiles that you can scroll through. One potential good use here might be if you were, if you're advertising, some kind of maybe an online summit, and each card you could show a different headshot of one of your keynote speakers, so people get a feel for you know, here are the types of speakers you might hear from if you register the same rules apply a single image here, where you get the same hundred and 50 characters for an intro. But then each card only gets 45 characters for a headline. And each image on the card needs to be formatted to 1080 by 1080. 10:15 The next variant is video ads. Now I end up recommending video ads only to about 5% of advertisers. And that generally means these are going to be the 5% of advertisers who are expert at video, they've already aced their creative on about every other network. And so when they come to LinkedIn, they already know that their creative is very high performance. And so it's a really easy translation. There are three different ways you can pay for video ads. Most people know the two second video view or the impression. Many don't know that you can actually also bid by the click which is the the least risky version and my favorite. So if I have video creative, I'm going to test it in a website visits objective first If it performs well to the click, then I can start testing. If I could save even more money to bidding by two second view or by the impression. There are three different formats for your video. You can do 16 by 9, which is just the normal it's 1920 by 1080. We've been able to do square for a while, which is 1920 by 1920, or even smaller sizes throughout. And that makes it nice for both mobile and desktop. But what's new that LinkedIn just released is vertical video. So now you can do video that's 1080 wide by 1920 tall. And this is great for specifically targeting the mobile users. If you have video creative that is formatted for vertical, it's actually only going to show up on mobile devices. So if you wanted to segment only to mobile devices, that could be a good way to do it. My recommendation is to keep all of your video under 30 seconds if possible, because if it's much longer, you will have Either most people not willing to stay and watch or a huge drop off before the end. So be brief. Also keep in mind, the same rule for all of social video applies here, it's going to start playing automatically, and it's going to play a muted, which means you want your thumbnail, the very first frame in the video should be something exciting. So if the video hasn't loaded yet, as they're scrolling by, it at least catches their eye. And then because the sounds off and 80% of people are going to watch it, totally with the sound off, you want to make sure that your subtitles are great. You can do this two different ways. You could either burn subtitles into the video file itself, which is really safe. Or you can generate an SRT file, a .SRT subtitles file. There are lots of different ways you can do this. You could go and pay rev.com $1 per minute to transcribe for you and created a dot SRT file. But then you upload that .SRT file as you upload the video, and LinkedIn will attach the subtitles to it and you'll be off to the races. My biggest qualm with LinkedIn video ads is that there just hasn't been an ability to retarget the traffic. So we pay LinkedIn premium prices, but then we can't do anything with it if they don't end up clicking. But this of course, changes in October in October, at least so far, it's looking like October, LinkedIn is going to be releasing engagement retargeting to the public, and then we'll be able to say something like if you've watched 50% of my first video, now I want to show you the second one in the sequence. Now my strategy here is if I can launch my video ads with CPC bidding, where I'm only going to pay by click, if I'm running this against other ads to the same audience, similar message, static image. If I can get my costs per click anywhere close on the video ads to the static ad, then I'm going to be happy running video ads. I know I can communicate way more emotion through video than I can from a static image. So if my cost per click is anywhere close, I'm assuming my lead quality is going to be better. And so I'm willing to pay, you know, maybe 10%, 20% more per click for a video. But if I'm paying double or triple for a video view, click, then I'm going to be happier running a static ads. Format here is it needs to be mp4 and it needs to be under 200 megabytes in file size. And you'll want to shoot at less than 30 frames per second because LinkedIn can't handle more than that. You can check out the link to the video add specs if you want to go deeper. Those are in the show notes below. 14:49 Next, we have a variation that can be applied to any type of sponsored content and actually any type of sponsored messaging ad too, and that is of course lead gen forms. Now, lead gen forms are really interesting. And they have been an absolute game changer for so many of our clients. And what they are, is if you interact with one of these ads, you click on it, a drawer will slide down with a form within the ad itself. That means there's no waiting for a new landing page to load. There's no assessing, do I trust this site or not? Because they're staying on LinkedIn. LinkedIn even sweetens the pot a little bit by auto filling all the fields that they know for the prospect. So if you're only asking for first name, last name, login email address. I really like asking for LinkedIn profile URL, that's a great one. So you don't have to ask for much else. You can get everything through that. Then this form is going to be totally auto filled. And if the prospect is interested, all they have to do is hit the submit button. Because LinkedIn has made this so frictionless. You will see incredibly high converting rates, we find that our conversion rates are most of the time 10% to 50%, higher. And we've definitely seen some times where conversion rates will double or even triple. Now, certainly lead gen forms are amazing, but they're not always a silver bullet. Because of that, I only recommend them to about 60% of advertisers. And the reason why is when you are using a lead gen form, that user it was so easy for them to fill out the form. Sometimes they don't even remember having filled out the form. And so if you contact them three days later, they may say, I'm pretty sure I didn't request any information from you, or I've never heard of you before. And it just generally leads to a lower quality of lead. Facebook advertisers will tell you this all day long with Facebook's lead ads, which is essentially the same product. Lots of times people assume Well, if all the form fields just filled out automatically, then people won't mind how much info I'm asking for. Well, that's not true. We've actually found that the more fields we ask for, we can scare people away, even if it's a lead gen form. So we suggest asking for fewer fields. But just be aware, whatever you're asking for, it will probably convert 10% to 50% higher as a lead gen form than it would if you send them to a landing page. Once someone actually fills out a form, LinkedIn is not going to deliver it to you super easily. So you're going to have to get the lead out of LinkedIn and into whatever system you're using. If you happen to be using salesforce.com, Marketo, Eloqua, HubSpot, live ramp, Microsoft Dynamics and a few others, then you're very much taken care of. There is a native integration there ready for you. But if you're not using one of their native integrated partners, you'll want to use Zapier.com. On their $20 a month plan, they can pipe your leads from LinkedIn into pretty much any CRM or marketing automation system out there. Like I mentioned, these lead gen forms can be attached to any type of sponsored content, or any type of message ads, which we'll get to here in a moment. They're a great way to reduce friction in your whole advertising process. So if you're having a hard time getting someone to, let's say, hop on the phone for a free consultation, maybe you have a super low conversion rate on your landing page, it's definitely worth trying as a lead gen form. Because it's taking so much of the friction away. I found that lead gen forms are by far the cheapest way to get your very qualified types of prospects into your email list for nurturing. They're just as no cheaper way to do that on LinkedIn. So this is great for just reducing your cost per lead. We talked about the lead quality generally being perceived as lower, and that is very, very true. We also see some other weaknesses, which is why I don't recommend these to 100% of advertisers. Because the traffic never lands on your website. You don't Don't get to track it with UTM parameters or any sort of analytics that you do. And you also can't retarget that traffic, at least yet, in October we'll be able to. So if your goal is to make as strong of an impression as possible on a super high value prospect, then I would still send them to a landing page. But certainly if your goal is just to get the cheapest cost for getting your ideal prospects into your funnel, so that you can then nurture them, then lead gen forms win hands down every time. 19:31 Then we move on to the text ads. I love text ads, they are very under appreciated, because they were the original ad format back in the day, these launched back in 2008. And they were the only ad format until 2013. When sponsored content launched. I love them so much because they are they utilize the same targeting as all the other ad formats. So you know your lead quality is going to be high and they're also the least expensive ad out there. The floor is static, they are always $2 per click at the floor. And you'll likely end up paying somewhere between about $3 to $5 per click. So if you're just trying to dip your toe in the water in LinkedIn Ads, and not spend a whole lot and just get a feel for what the lead qualities like, I would recommend text ads. The big downside to text ads is really, they're very low click through rate. The average click through rate we see from these is .025%. Put into perspective, that is two and a half clicks out of every 10,000 times these ads are displayed. So very, very low click through rate. You'd have to have either a very large audience or a click through rate that is much higher than average to really spend much budget at all. If you were into Google ads or AdWords back in the day, this will feel very familiar. We get a 25 character headline on these and then a 75 characters Description, which is the old AdWords was 35 and 35, for description lines. So LinkedIn gave us an extra five combined for a description, we also get a 100 by 100 pixel image, which is most often reduced to 50 x 50. The low click through rate can be a little bit of a liability, it means it's hard to spend too much money on them. And you might wonder if it's worth your time to actually set up because of how little traffic it runs. But I want to tell you about something that I really appreciate, which is you get tons of free branding. The frequency cap on these is something like 20 impressions per day per member. So imagine everything your ideal prospects are doing. They're seeing your logo in front of their face constantly. That can be very powerful. We've seen a lift as much as 15% when we're running sponsored content, and then we launch text ads to the same audience. We'll see 15% higher click through rates in our sponsored content. So there is power in combining these for sure. These are over in the right rail only on desktop, so you might not even remember having seen them. They usually show up in a three pack, sometimes there's a two pack. And very often, the top bidder will appear at the very top of the page in an ad format that LinkedIn used to sell individually called the one by one, but it's just a single line of text at the very top of your browser. I mentioned these are super low risk. And the reason why is because they don't get clicked on very much. So it's really hard to spend too much budget, and when they get clicked, it's usually a really inexpensive click. So if you're looking for just low risk getting the cheapest clicks possible, and you like the idea of 100% of this traffic being from a desktop because this isn't even available on mobile devices, then text ads are for you. I generally recommend them to About 15% of advertisers, but certainly I think they're worth anyone's time just for the branding aspect. 23:08 Okay, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into the sponsored messaging ad formats right after this. 23:13 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com. The LinkedIn Ads experts. 23:23 B2Linked is the LinkedIn ads focused agency. We manage many of LinkedIn's largest accounts worldwide, and we are official LinkedIn partners, do contact us on B2Linkedin.com to get in touch, and our team can help you enact these and other strategies to help you get the very best of the best performance. 23:42 All right, let's jump now into sponsored messaging. There are now two different flavors of sponsored messaging. So we'll go through both. But we'll start out with just the basics about the entire category. I want you to think of this like it's a cold email. And rather than the other ad formats we've talked about, so far, where you're only paying when someone clicks, these, you actually pay per send. So you're going to pay on average 20 to 60 cents. And that's in North America, that's about what we pay. And you send these to someone with no guarantee that they will see it or open it, or click on your call to action. So this ends up being actually the most expensive ad format, and making it also the riskiest. Here's how the math works out and how you should think about these. So you're going to pay 20 to 60 cents per person you send it to, on average about 50% will open. And then on average, about 3% to 4% of people of those who open it will end up clicking on your call to action. So when you look at your actual cost per click here, you're going to end up in the $10 to $40 range, which is insane, and that's all based off of the averages. So of course if you're going to be running these, you don't want to be average, you want to get a higher than a 50% open rate, and then a significantly higher click through rate. If you can do that, you can end up getting cost per click significantly lower than where you could with sponsored content. But it takes a very special kind of offer to make this work. When I say a special offer, I mean, it has to feel like a personal invitation. If you have an offer, like hey, because of who you are in the industry, we want to give you early access or a sneak peek at something that we're building or it's something in your industry. That feels very special. It feels very VIP. Maybe you want to invite someone as a VIP to a free event you're putting on where there's going to be drinks and networking with their peers. That also feels very special. Maybe even something like hey, we're looking for people like you. Does this position look interesting to you would you want to apply? Those are all great examples of things that performed very well as a sponsored messaging ad. The rule that I run every one of my message ads through is I asked myself if I would be excited about getting this as a cold email from someone, or if I would mark it as spam. Because if you would mark it as spam, you know, this would be the most expensive way you could advertise on LinkedIn. But if a cold email to you, you'd be excited about the opportunity, then you know that this is going to land super well as an ad. We mentioned before that these can be attached to lead gen forms, which really helps conversion rates. And because these feel very personal because there is some dynamic insertion you can do. You can insert someone's first name, last name, title, company, industry, this will feel very personal to them. It'll feel like someone is actually reaching out to them and feel a little bit special. So when you get leads here, they are generally of a much higher quality, which is great. Be aware though, when you are evaluating your performance here, realize that LinkedIn is not truthful in the metrics that they show you. Now I know that's a bold accusation. But let me explain. on all of the other ad formats, you only have two layers, you have an impression goes to a click, and then a click goes to a conversion. But with sponsored messaging ads, you effectively have one extra step in between. So LinkedIn added the opens, but when they started calculating click through rate, the same way that they always have, click through rate, as they say, it is actually just your open rate. So people look at this and go, Oh, wow, I have a 40 cent cost per click here. That sounds insane. And it really is because if you calculate it out, you're probably only going to have a three to a 4% click through rate. And so your metrics there about what your cost per click are, if you're just looking at the dashboard are definitely going to be lying to you. So if you are running any sort of sponsored messaging, I would encourage you go and manually calculate it. Go and look at your cost for how much you've sent. And then just divided by the number of actual clicks you've received on your offer. And that will tell you what your actual cost per click is. And certainly, if I had a cost per click that was 20 30%, higher on sponsored messaging, then I would be happy to pay that, because the lead quality is generally much better. And these are so good at delivering rapidly if you're trying to get the word out about something. This is a great way of pushing it out to people. So you're not just waiting for you're putting something in the feed and waiting for people to click and come to you. 28:30 When you use these, you do get a free banner ad. And not everyone takes them up on this, but realize that if you don't upload a 300 by 250 banner ad to be used on just your desktop visitors, it's just a waste because one of your competitors could pop up instead. So it's certainly worth going to your designer and having them kick out an extra banner image for you. 28:52 Okay, so let's go down to the actual flavors of what sponsored messaging commands. The very first one, the original is called Message ads, it used to be called sponsored in mail. Now, I only recommend these to about 5% of advertisers simply because you really only get one shot with someone, you send them out this message. And if they don't click on it, they're gone. And in order for someone to actually want to click on it, it really does have to be this special kind of offer that makes them feel like a VIP makes them feel very valued. This will appear in your messaging. So in your LinkedIn in mail, you get a subject line that people see first, up to 60 characters, and then you get text in the message itself up to 1500 characters. Now, if your subject line is good, you'll see your open rate be higher than 50%. So try to get it up in the %60, 70% is, I think 76% the highest I've ever seen. And then your text, even if you're allowed 1500 characters, I would recommend still shooting for less. People don't want to read a wall of text. And so start by teasing them. Don't give them everything. up front. Otherwise, they'll just see a wall of text and start to ignore you. But if that text is effective, you should see a click through rate higher than 4%. So watch for that. All of the other ad formats are relatively quick to create, we will end up designing all of our ads in Excel. So we have very quick copy and paste to create ads. But any sort of sponsored messaging is a lot more involved. It takes us about two or more minutes per ad to create a message ad, whereas it's probably going to end up taking us less than one minute to create sponsored content of any kind, and certainly texts that are super quick. There's also no retargeting here yet for message ads, so if someone doesn't make it to your landing page, they're kind of just gone to you. Now when engagement retargeting comes out in October, I'm really hopeful that they will have retargeting here where you could say something like if someone opened my message ad but didn't click, then I want to send them another one. Because these are like a cold email, they work really well to warm audiences because it's not cold anymore. It's now warm. But then I think about it like this. If I already have their email address, then why wouldn't I just email them for free? Why would I pay LinkedIn 20 to 60 cents to send it, but these can be really good for that. 31:23 But the newest variation that LinkedIn just barely came out with I mentioned a couple episodes ago in the news section. These are called conversation ads. They are Lincoln's newest ad format, and one that I'm truly excited about. I told you that I only recommend message ads to about 5% of advertisers because you have to have this special offer. But your conversation ads are essentially a chat bot experience. So you'll send this to someone and you'll give them some options. And let's say you were asking someone if they were going to be at an event because maybe you're going to be at that event and you'd like to meet them at your booth to talk. You might start off the conversation by saying, "Hey, are you going to be at this event?" And if they respond, no, they're not just gone like they would be with message ads. You can follow up and say, "Oh, well, sorry, you're not going to be there to meet us. But hey, how about do you want to join this webinar we're doing next week to talk about something that we're going to be talking about at the conference anyway, and you won't miss out on the great conference stuff". So because you get more shots on goal here, you're not just wasting it with one message that people aren't especially interested in. Now you can test different messages. And what we found we were actually part of the pilot here, and we have a case study with our clients on the initial release of conversation ads. We found that these have a 30% higher conversion rate than message ads did. So that means that 30% of the traffic that would have just seen the message and bounced, ended up converting, which is amazing. So because it's 30% more effective, it means I can end up recommending these a lot more often. So I find myself recommending conversation adds about 10% of advertisers, as opposed to the 5% from message ads. I think with these being just more versatile than message ads, and really giving us more shots on goal, I think these will very quickly become the most used sponsored messaging ad format. The big downside to you who's creating it, though, these are even more involved than message ads. I told you that it takes us about two minutes per message ad to create one with conversation ads, it takes us 20 plus minutes to create each ad. 33:46 There's no bulk creation, there's not very many shortcuts. So it's it's very difficult to do these, but knowing that they perform 30% better is enough for me to say it's worth our time in creating. Your initial message. be up to 500 characters. And you can, at least as far as we can tell, you can ask unlimited questions. And you do get to put unique links in for every answer. So if you're really insane about your UTM tracking parameters like we are, every single answer, every single question, can have a unique tracking link so you can really pay attention to what's working and what's not. 34:24 Alright, now let's move on to dynamic ads. Now, you might know dynamic ads as being LinkedIns creepiest ad format, because they stick your picture into them. That's, of course joking. I've heard a few people say that that's creepy. But I think most people understand that a company is not actually sticking your face in their ad. This is done by LinkedIn dynamically. These are shared inventory with text ads. So they are only available on desktop and they're over in the right rail, because they're essentially combining what was three different text ads, they tend to have a click through rate. That's six nificantly higher than text ads, but will still look significantly lower than your sponsored content. I recommend these to about 10% of advertisers. I used to recommend these zero percent because they used to be insanely expensive. They were usually twice the price of sponsored content, and their click through rates were low like text ads. But just recently, LinkedIn had a price reduction on these when they took all of the inventory back from their programmatic ads, and dynamic ads was the beneficiary of that reduction and got all of the ad inventory. So because of that cost per click came down significantly. And now I recommend these a lot more because you can pay between six to $8 per click on these, whereas they used to be in the 15 to $18 range. This is the best ad format that you can use to get people to follow your company page. It's a native ad format that's just asking "Hey, we want you to follow our company page". These started out life as an ad format just for talent solutions, the the talent side of the business. And then LinkedIn Marketing Solutions ended up taking it because it was already developed, and it was worth a shot. These do work very well for hiring, you've probably seen the ads that are like picture yourself at IBM. You get a 70 character description, and then a 50 character headline down below, and a 100 by 100 pixel image. These come in three different flavors. One's called spotlight ads, which funny name, but it just means that it links to your website. So if you want to send someone to an external landing page, that's on your website, you'll want to select spotlight ads. And for these, you'll get an optional 300 by 250 pixel background image. So you can customize these a little bit to maybe feel more like your brand. You can also dynamically insert their first name, their job title, and even their company name as variables. 37:05 Then, like I mentioned, there is a follower ad. And this is just to follow the company page. And it is the most efficient way to get more company page followers as you're paying for them. This is so much better after the price reduction, because now you can actually get your cost per follower down into a really palatable range. You can dynamically insert someone's first name and company name into this. The third variation is called job ads. And I don't have a whole lot to say here except they exist. And that's because I've never used them for a job ad purpose. I would much rather use sponsored content and text ad formats to get people for a position. So I haven't ever used these, I'm assuming very similar performance to the others. Okay, I've got all of the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around 38:01 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. 38:04 Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 38:11 Okay, we're gonna go over all of the episode resources. So down in the show notes, you'll find that article we talked about at the beginning about the cities that because of COVID, their hiring either did okay, or it totally tanked. So that'll be interesting to watch. But you'll also notice links to all of the different ad specs around each of the ad formats. So check and see a link to video ad specs, carousel ad specs, single image ads, text ads, message ads, conversation ads, and dynamic ads. So whichever of these you want to start creating, go ahead and check out the specs to make sure that you've got all of the assets you need to tackle them. There's also a link to our LinkedIn Course that we did with LinkedIn Learning. You'll definitely want to check that out. It's very inexpensive and a great walkthrough and introduction In the world of LinkedIn Ads. And of course, I would implore you on whichever podcast player you are listening, please hit that subscribe button so you can hear more of this awesome deep LinkedIn ads content, if I don't say so myself. And then of course, if you're liking what you're hearing, please do rate and review. It makes a big difference because we're on Episode 12. This is very early on in the journey and certainly anyone who's interested in LinkedIn Ads, I hope they are listening to this. So please help share it with them. drop us an email at Podcast@B2Linked.com with any ideas for episodes, any questions based off of what you've heard, and we will see you back here next week. We're cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Resources for the episode: Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Show resources: Pages Resource LinkedIn Learning Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Transcript: LinkedIn Pages are inextricably connected to LinkedIn Ads. And we're talking to the head of Pages today about the newest features, and you're not gonna want to miss it. 0:14 Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. 0:23 Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. On this episode, I interview Ting Ba, LinkedIn's Head of their Pages product. I've been excited about this one for a while. Since pages are so crucial to advertising, I thought you'd love to hear the most recent updates on the product. First off, I have to apologize for the sound quality on this interview. Ting is amazing. And she's also incredibly busy. And we couldn't make this happen while I was there in person. So as soon as I found out that she could do it over zoom without good audio equipment. I said screw it, I'm happy to record however we could make this happen. 0:56 So let's hit it. Hi, everyone. I'm super excited to introduce you to Ting Ba. She is the group Product Marketing Manager at LinkedIn over Pages. Ting, first of all, welcome. Thanks for coming on. And we'd love to hear about you tell us about you personally at work, anything you'd want to share. 1:13 Thanks, AJ so much for having me happy to introduce myself. So like he says, I'm a group Product Marketing Manager for LinkedIn Pages. I've been with LinkedIn for actually just over a year. It's crazy how time flies by. And in my role, I lead Product Marketing for LinkedIn Pages, and reallyall the different kind of organic opportunities a business could take advantage of on our platform. And I have to say, I truly, genuinely love my job. I get to really help businesses of all sizes all over the world find success on our platform, which is really very gratifying for me, because I come from a background of, you know,family that's largely small business owners and so very personally gratifying. Just in terms of me, personally, you know a bit about me, I live in the California Bay Area, in Paul Alto, with my husband, and we've got two little girls, Audrey and Sophie. Audrey is one, Sophie is four. And yeah, just very blessed to be able to, you know, do a job I love and have a family that I get to hang out with after work. 2:09 That's awesome. And you're in the right place because you are leading a product that we all use. And I'm sure love. And so thanks, first of all, for all your hard work on your product. As many of you may know, LinkedIn Pages are inextricably linked to advertising. So that's my interest in having Ting come on and talk about this. But there was also a recent quarterly update that went out. And so stay tuned here at the end, we'll get to talk a little bit more about that. I think foundationally we really have to start with what our LinkedIn Pages give us the very basics of how we should understand how this fits into our roles to our companies to our marketing mix. 2:47 Yeah, AJ, that's such a great question. I think it's really important to start with something foundational like that, which is essentially what is the LinkedIn Page? So really, quite simply, a LinkedIn Page is what I would consider to be a business's most Important online asset. It's essentially your foundation in the world's professional community. It's a place where businesses of all sizes really all over the world can share their mission, their vision, their values, and also promote their products and services with a professional community. It's actually the first place that LinkedIn members go so they can learn more about your brand, what you stand for, and why they should do business with you or work for you, for that matter. So I would say actually, in the same way that a LinkedIn profile offers this unique value to members to grow themselves. A LinkedIn Page offers this unique value to organizations. 3:35 And you did mention in there about kind of these employment opportunities as well as promoting the company. Can you share a little bit about how how companies can go about buoying up your page to help it look better for recruiting versus trying to look good as a company and maybe trying to get business out of that? 3:54 Yeah, it's a great question is, you know, kind of the way that you would strategize corporate branding versus talent branding. It's a great question. If you're really focused on talent branding, there are things you can just do completely for free, without spending any dollars on our platform to help showcase your talent brand. Some things I've seen some brands do a good job of is they spotlight their current employees and really showcase, you know, what their passions are for working for the company, but also by their passions outside of work, I think spotlighting employees is a really great way to humanize your brand and show your true talent potential. But in terms of corporate brand, there's a whole bunch of things that you can do with your page to really showcase what your company is all about. There's some of the features that I'll definitely talk to you as we talk about what recently launched, but some ideas that I have are off the top of my bat is just you know, leveraging video, right, or potentially leveraging document uploads to showcase the best of your brand. With document uploads. You can upload PDFs, PowerPoints, and Word docs to showcase perhaps your menu of services or customer testimonials. With video, video is just really taken off in our platform. You know, it's actually the fastest growing content type, completely free to use, and members really engage with it. So those are just some ways of how you can use some of our features to really better promote your corporate brand. 5:08 That's fantastic. So let's say there's someone out there who does not currently have a a business's company page, or sorry, I keep calling a company page, we should call them organizational pages. What would you tell someone? Why should someone go obviously, who isn't an advertiser? Why should someone go and set up a page on LinkedIn? And how should they think about filling it out and making the most of it? 5:31 That's a really common question that I get AJ. Oftentimes, people ask like, well, that's great you're sharing all this with me, but why should I care? Like, why should I actually put the time and effort into creating a LinkedIn Page? So, I can answer this question by just kind of taking a step back and sharing with you more about the LinkedIn platform. 5:49 So as you know, LinkedIn is a professional community. And generally speaking, we've seen some incredibly strong growth when it comes to the number of members that are actually joining our platform. In fact, as of today, we have over 645 million professionals that are actually on our platform. And I also want to mention that for the third year in a row, LinkedIn has been votedas the most trusted social media platform, which I think is really important in this day and age. Lastly, I want to also share that last year, an independent research agency actually put together this report, pretty cool, to understand the different mindsets that consumers have when they log into different social media platforms. And what the research showed is thatwhen people log into LinkedIn, they actually log inwith an intent and a mindset to learn and to actually look for opportunities versus when they're on other platforms, they're actually really more focused on passive entertainment. And I think it's actually really important to note that because what this means is that this is an incredibly unique and powerful opportunity for businesses of all sizes, to really get in front of a growing professional audience that's actually paying attention and engaged from the moment they login. And considering that the LinkedIn Page is really the first place people will look when they want to learn more about you want to perform means that you should really invest the effort upfront to set it up and keep it maintained. 7:06 That's perfect. I love it. What would you say to someone who is, let's say, marketing manager, they know they have five different channels that they need to manage? Why should they come to their LinkedIn page and share content specifically? 7:21 Yeah, it's a great question because we all know that people nowadays, especially in marketing are very time strapped, right, they're getting pulled in different directions. And people's attention spans are generally pretty short. And so if you do spend your valuable time on another platform, it really has to be worth your time and attention. And so in order to really influence people that LinkedIn is really a platform or the best again, I kind of go back to those stats around how we have over 645 million professionals on our platform, and that is the most trusted platform actually, of all the social media platforms. I think that trust actually is what really makes it go a long way. I think when you have trust, that means that the messages that you're hearing are actually landing with you, and actually leaving an impression on you much more so and much more long lasting than if you want a platform where you really can't trust all the advertisements and all the direct messages you're hearing. I think trust is inherent to building relationships and so of our platform has it, it's definitely a place you want to be investing your time in. 8:15 I agree. I love when I go and check out a company. And I see that they've shared something today or they shared something yesterday. It shows the lights are on em someone's home and I tend to trust that brand quite a bit more. 8:26 Yes, exactly. And it's the trust is definitely a key component. And another thing that I think a lot of brands will immediately recognize once you start investing is that the engagement quality is especially high. You're not just getting reactions or kind of like you know, your affinity metrics of like impressions and likes, you are actually getting a quality comments from people. Because, as you know, on LinkedIn, you're not anonymous. Everything's tied back to professional profile. People go on not only to learn, but they also want to demonstrate that they're thought leaders are that they're experts in their professional field. And so you oftentimes can have these really great, engaging quality conversations around topics that people care about. And I think that's very rewarding, I would think, as a marketing manager, right, to be able to actually engage and build a relationship with the community. I think that's that that kind of people will engagement is what really we should all be aiming for in marketing. 9:14 I agree, it's not just an asset you set up once and tick the box. And it's done. It's a place to actually spend time and a place to really provide value, I think. 9:22 Yeah, I think it's really all about the long term value. And I think when you have these kind of quality relationships and conversations being built, that's where you really have like, I think the framework for a long term, long term success. 9:33 So I remember the days of old where the company page, you really had four things, you could put a logo on it, you could write a paragraph, fill out a few fields, and that was kind of it. Those days are gone. Your LinkedIn page really does more now, what are the types of things that you can now do with with an organization's page? 9:51 Yes, you've been there on the journey with us from the beginning and things I've really uh, there's things have really evolved since then. And so I would love to share with you what you can do with it. Did pagers actually so much. And just to kind of make it a little bit easier to kind of understand the different opportunities, I'll bring it up into things you can do organically, as well as things you can do through paid solutions. And so in terms of what you can do organically, I'm really proud to share that actually, you can get great organic reach on LinkedIn, which is not super common lately, right? There's actually no cap to the amount of organic reach you can get. And in fact, we've created features to help you maximize your organic reach. And so a couple things I want to highlight that are my favorite features. 10:28 One of them is communities hashtags, which we introduced a couple of months ago. And so with this feature, what you can do is associate your page with up to three different hashtags around topics that you care about. And you can also see real time how many members are following these hashtags. Now, the beauty of this feature is you can actually click into the hashtag conversation feed and kind of just see what people are talking about, see what kind of posts are trending within this hashtag. And you can actually click into the conversation to actually talk to people from the perspective of your organization. Now that to me is one of the most authentic and best organic ways to grow your brand's awareness is by actually having conversations with people who care about the same topics, but just maybe haven't heard of your brand. Like, that's pretty cool. 11:12 And it's not just the followers that you get to to have. It's not you're now getting your brand in front of people who are having real active conversations. That's a big deal. 11:22 Yeah, exactly. It's not just your followers is way more broad than that. And you're still talking to people who care about the same topic because it's all around a topical hashtag. So completely true. 11:31 Another thing I would highlight as something you really effective you can do organically to increase your reach is a video. I mentioned it earlier, but I'll say it again, you know, video, it's, you know, organic video is free use on our platform. And it's such a fast growing content type. It's actually five times more likely to generate engagement than just a standard post. And very recently, we also introduced LinkedIn Live, which is essentially live video streaming on our platform. And this has just really taken off on the platform. It actually drives, even compared to regular video, 24 times more engagement, and brands are just really loving all of the engagement that they're seeing. And so that's another thing I'd highly recommend is something you can do right now today organically on your page. Now, once you start to really, you know, invest organically in your page to really make sure you're taking full advantage of all the learnings, what we recommend is that you actually check out your LinkedIn Page analytics, because there's a robust set of information you can find there. And you'll really be able to get a sense of who's visiting your page and have deeper insights into their role, their function, level of seniority, and also what kind of content resonates most with them. And once you get a sense of this target, demographic profile, and like what kind of content you should be sharing, this is where the paid solutions can really come into play and impactful role. We actually have a really strong portfolio of paid solutions that can amplify all of your organic efforts. I'll just quickly highlight some examples. Sponsored content is a really great example of a paid solution. These are essentially apps that live in our LinkedIn feed. And they include static image, video, and carousel ads. And we actually combined a sponsored content campaign in parallel with a sponsored inmail campaign, which are basically targeted messages you can send to members, you can actually see a two x lift and your overall conversion rate. 13:16 I love those stats of how each of the ad formats really works together to help your overall goal. And that's something that we can't see from our side. That's like, you guys can see it on your side. And so we love it when you share that. Thanks so much. 13:30 Yeah, for sure. 13:32 So you just recently released a new update. This came out on October 14, I believe it was a Tuesday. Oh, 15th. So it was the quarterly update for pages. Can you tell us about what you announced and maybe the effects how we as LinkedIn members, how we should use it, what we should be excited about? 13:53 Yeah, I'm so glad you asked that because we did make a pretty big announcement. We're super excited about it. I'm happy to talk about you know, what we what we talked about. So, at a high level, what we launched are a series of features that will actually make it easier for organizations to build meaningful professional communities with members. And the first feature that we launched is something called employee notifications. Now, this feature is really exciting. It's one of its kind. And what it does is it enables brands to transform their employees into brand advocates. And I think this is really important because employees are oftentimes every brands best advocate, right? They work for you. They're proud to work for you. And they do want to actually talk about the great work they're doing. But we've found that historically, it's actually pretty hard for any brand to kind of scale this. So that's why we introduced this new organic feature to make it easier for brands to leverage their employees voices to build meaningful awareness. Now, in terms of like how this should be used by members. The way this works is, if a brand has an important message that they want to have their employees share on their behalf. What they can do is they can actually prompt their employees through a push notification to reshare, that message, the employees will actually get a push notification on their mobile device available on iOS and Android. And they have an opportunity to consider whether or not they actually want to share that with their professional network. And we recommend you know that it's really something you don't do more than say once a week as a brand. So you don't over notify your employees. We actually have a built in guardrails for you can't use this feature more than once every seven days. So that's the first feature. 15:28 I love that one. I have to say, I get asked all the time from those who are marketers, obviously, on the ad side, but they're saying organically, we want to do something with our company, page too, and maybe we don't have that many followers or when we share it doesn't get all too much engagement or doesn't get more than let's say if the employees themselves shared it. And yeah, this just seems like such a great vehicle to leverage the networks and the networks networks of all of your employees as well as grow your company page. Following, this just feels like a total home run to me. 16:02 Yeah. And AJ, I think you made a good point, because I think it all comes back to what we talked about earlier, which is trust. I think the reason why a lot of brands want to lean on employees to really be brand advocates is because employees are, they're humans who are trusted within their own professional communities. And I think when you you know, really speak on behalf of a company for the company speaking itself, it lands so much more, right with like, local communities. And so I think it is actually a really powerful feature. And I think I really what I really want to encourage brands to do is really think about the messages that you're sharing, make sure that they're ones that you feel are important and are true to your company's mission versus more short term, you know, kind of messages really make sure that their core to driving forward, you know, I think a more long term message, and again, you can only use this once a week, so make sure whatever message you do pick that it's something that is a value to a larger community and is more long term thinking. 16:54 And it seems like something that we as, let's say community managers inside of companies should probably letting employees know, like, hey, just a heads up, you're probably going to start seeing notifications about the stuff that we as a company care about the most. Do you recommend that kind of a pre messaging strategy, letting them know, before you start sending push notifications? 17:14 That's such a, that's such a good insight, actually, that probably giving a heads up to your internal teams wouldbe helpful. So they won't be as caught off guard or like they won't find it jarring when they get a notification. And so I actually think that is a really good best practice that and this is a feature you plan to use frequently and right off the bat. But it's actually really helpful to give people a heads up, so they're not surprised by it or that they don't just ignore it. 17:36 That feels really good to me. So that was the first part of the announcement. What were the other two announcements that came out? 17:44 Yes. So along similar lines, right, you can kind of notice a theme around you know, kind of leveraging employees. We also introduced employee kudos and team moments as a way for brands to recognize their employees and their teams on key milestones such as work anniversaries, major Project completions or promotions. And personally, I think that recognizing your teams and your employees, the people who really do the work is important for all organizational cultures. And I believe this is actually going to be key for helping brands, humanize their brands in front of members, and also better showcase their talent brand. And so we're really excited about having watched that as well. 18:21 Is that an external thing? Or is it Do you have to be working for the company in order to see those announcements, 18:26 So anyone can see those announcements. It's going to be broadly available on your LinkedIn page. And one thing I do want to mention is that you can only give kudos or share team bonus moments with people who actually work for your company. Meaning like, you can't recognize a partner today, or you can't recognize a customer. But I think those are compelling use cases that we might consider in the future. And we're always looking for feedback. So if there are, you know, optimizations people like to see to this feature or anything I just mentioned, please send them my way because we're always looking for ways to optimize our product experiences. 18:57 Great, I think this is actually a positive thing that they have to be associated with the company page to be recognized. Because every once in a while we'll find an employee of a company who didn't type the company's name in properly or set up their profile before the company had a page or something, and they're not associated with it. This feels like a great way to get your employees all on associated to the right company page. 19:20 That's a good point, AJ, I did not think about that. That is really, really good thinking. Yeah, that absolutely is true. It's like a forcing function. 19:26 Yeah, totally. 19:29 All right. So anything else you want to share about the kudos feature? 19:33 No, just that we are really excited about it. And definitely, as you see it, you know, being launched to your page, definitely check it out. Again, I think it's really key to establishing trust and really humanizing your brand. 19:46 Great. And now tell us about the third feature announcement, or the third feature announced? 19:51 Yes, this one I'm really excited about and it really comes I would say just completely based on feedback we've gotten from our amazing page admins. They're always giving us feedback. And one of the top themes I've heard in general is like, you know, like, I get the importance of a LinkedIn page, you've shared it, I know why you'd create one, just help me, what are the first few steps? You know, I mean, and we've created kind of more long form content, or we have playbooks and videos. But, sometimes you just need something that's really simple in product that can guide you. So that's exactly what we launched is essentially a pages completion meter. And this is essentially going to be your guide for building out your LinkedIn page. And at LinkedIn, we've done the analysis on the back end to really understand what are the top actions every page needs to take to just find like baseline success, and we've broken down those steps into a simple guided onboarding process. And so every page is going to have this where they'll show you how far along you are in the journey, what additional steps you need to take, you'll get reminders, you'll be linked to best practices. Super excited about the potential this has for onboarding getting people started in a successful way. 20:52 Well, I'll tell you I'm super excited about this one, because the more complete a company's page is, the more effective we are at advertising to those companies, if you have this forcing function where you're telling someone not necessarily forcing, but you're telling someone, "Hey, your page is incomplete because you haven't included your company size, or your industry" or something along those lines, I think this can be great for advertisers. 21:15 Yes, I think so. And I think it'll be great for anyone who just wants to start promoting themselves on LinkedIn, because there's a lot of information that people don't realize, for example, there are six required fields that you need to have in order to have a complete page. And if you're missing even just one field, your page just will not come up during member search. It's such a light lift to just, you know, add a logo, add your URL, and so we'll tell you exactly what you need exactly what you're missing. And just like that, if you just simply fill out those six fields, complete pages actually get 30% more pageviews. So you're literally just boosting your traffic by these several steps, and so really excited for the potential as well offer to two pages, both new aswell as existing. 21:57 And to capture that 30% lift you, really, I mean, these aren't hard questions. It's not like an exam, you just go and fill out the company's basic information. 22:05 Like it's like your logo, you know, the city in which your business operates, your URL, your industry, you know, pretty straightforward things like that. And so all that is not going to be documented in a very clear way directly within the products. 22:19 I love that. So other than logging in and watching things change as they do quite rapidly in LinkedIn world. If someone wants to learn more about pages in general, see the announcements, where do they go? What resources do you have for them? 22:33 Yes, I have a resource that I love to share. It's our best practices page. My team keeps it updated in as close to real time as possible. The short link is lnkd.in/pagesbp. Quite a mouthful so I'll repeat that again. It's lnkd.in/pagesbp. BP for best practices. And if you scroll to, I would say the bottom third of the page, you're gonna find a section that says dive deeper. And there, we basically house all of our best practice materials, including playbooks. And we have playbooks for SMBs. For enterprises. for startups, we also have video tutorials for how to use all these different features. So definitely check that out. 23:20 Oh, that's a great resource. And don't worry if if you were exercising or driving in the car, you don't have to write that like down, don't worry, that'll be in the show notes. So on the employee push notifications, what should you encourage your employees to do with that post to create the maximum impact for the company? Is it a, you know, Hey, everyone, if you would comment and kind of build this social proof like or is it a, you know, reshare it to your network? What do you see as the best practice there? 23:49 That's a great question, AJ. I'll start by saying that ultimately, it's up to each individual employee if they actually want to engage with and further promote their company's content. And so it's really something they should think about. forehand if they actually do want to engage and reshare because it's not required, it's a decision they can make. But if they do decide that it's something they want to further promote. What we do recommend is resharing the post to really help boost that message with their professional network. 24:13 That's perfect. That comes to the end of our questions. So the biggest question I want to ask to you is just what are you most excited about? This can be your professional life, personal life, a hobby, anything that you're working towards, but let us know what's most exciting to you right now. 24:28 I love that question. And this is the right time to ask because I'm all about the holidays. And with Thanksgiving, Halloween and Christmas coming up. This is like my favorite time of year. And I'm excited to be taking two weeks off to go to Tokyo and Taipei to visit my family with my children. So that is what I'm the most excited about. And I also just got a nice new camera to help document all the photographs. And so this is something I'm really looking forward to. 24:52 Oh, that's fantastic. Well, we're gonna be cheering you on in the holidays. Enjoy that trip to Tokyo. I just want to say thank you so much for coming on to the podcast and sharing everything about pages. I think we are much better for understanding this as even advertisers. And again, thanks for all your hard work on the product making it so helpful to us. 25:13 Of course, thank you so much for having me. This was such a pleasure to chat with you. 25:23 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 25:33 All right, I hope you really enjoyed that episode, that awesome interview with Ting, the Pages resource that she mentioned, the link lnkd.in/pagesbp that link it's actually the full drawn out link in the show notes down below. So click that to check out the resource she was pointing you towards. Also anyone who's looking to get started with LinkedIn Ads, definitely check out the course that I did with LinkedIn Learning. And of course, if you are listening to this for the first time, thank you for showing up and on whatever podcast player you're listening, make sure to hit that subscribe button. I would love to have you back here every week listening to all the updates here. And if you're liking what you're hearing, which I hope you are, hit that rate and review button wherever your podcast player is as well. I would love to see more people finding out about the show who are using LinkedInAds in their job. With any show ideas, any feedback about the show, please email us Podcast@B2Linked.com and I will see you back here next week cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Show resources: LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Transcript: LinkedIn targeting is the reason we're willing to pay LinkedIn premium prices. Oh, you know we're about to get geeky today. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. 0:21 Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! Today we're taking a deep dive into the targeting facets on LinkedIn. And I'm about to brain dump on you. If you were one of the ones who loved episode three because of how geeky we got into the history of LinkedIn Ads. I think you're gonna like this one just as much. I'm going to cover each available type of targeting that LinkedIn has to offer. Yes, all 24, and we'll discuss #1) how accurate the targeting is, #2) how it's useful, and then #3) any gotchas or nuances that you should know about or care about as you're using it. We'll also talk about how it's derived. And we'll also target the targeting facets in order presented in campaign manager so you can follow right along. Alright, let's hit it. 1:05 First up in the news, the COVID-19 pandemic is causing a lot of advertisers to pull back. I hear from those who are heavy on Facebook ads that this is something that has caused prices to significantly drop on Facebook. On LinkedIn, we are seeing advertisers pull back so you're seeing maybe slight decreases in CPMs or CPCs. You may see an increase in traffic as more and more people are working from home. And maybe there's some unrest about potential layoffs. And so they might be using LinkedIn to maybe line up their next job or check and see other opportunities. So this is a great time to be advertising on LinkedIn, because it's my belief that B2B will always move a little bit slower than B2C. So I'm guessing that b2b will recover much quicker and probably won't take as much of a hit. So right now, while costs are a little bit depressed, now is a good thing. To be running ads, and starting those conversations with people who are maybe these are longer sales cycles. So you're starting the relationship now, and not asking immediately for a demo. For any type of advertising where you are asking directly for a demo, let's say it's search ads, or maybe you are using LinkedIn as a bottom of funnel type of platform, then yeah, I think now would be a good time to either pull budget or pull back. But if you're using LinkedIn as intended to capture audience attention, and start to nurture that relationship with something like, you know, free content, gated assets, that kind of thing. Now's a really good time to continue to spend while your competitors are all fearful. All right, as we move into targeting here, LinkedIn has the most detailed business targeting of any platform on the planet. We've talked about that before. I love the fact that it's so scalable, it's access to this audience, pretty much for anyone who's a white collar professional. Plus, it was purpose built showcasing your professional self. So it's the first and sometimes only place you go to tell when you change positions. I like to joke that LinkedIn is the second person to know when I make a career change after I tell my wife. It's got unprecedented scale, since platforms like Facebook come and go with popularity. But LinkedIn is a constant. I like to call it a low level hum. LinkedIn doesn't always make a lot of noise, but it's always there and always useful. And because of that low level hum, it always seems useful, and it seems immune to pop culture attention. So while Facebooks will come and go and become the Myspaces, I think LinkedIn is here for the long haul. There's no other platform that can replace it. The way you will notice the unprecedented scale is it's really rare when one of our clients has a budget that we can't actually spend on their very ideal target audience. So that tells you the extent of the scale you get with LinkedIn, with these white collar professionals. Certainly if you're targeting someone who maybe LinkedIn isn't a perfect fit for, like, let's say something like door to door salespeople, maybe you're trying to recruit them. They're out knocking on doors all day long and so they're not in front of a computer. But for the most part, it's really not hard to spend any sort of budget you have on the perfect audience on LinkedIn. Now, as for how LinkedIn derives each of these targeting methods, we'll dive into that. And there are three main types. LinkedIn has a lot of the first two, and is starting to incorporate more of the third. So these types are Explicit Targeting, which means you're specifically told LinkedIn something about you. Then there's Implicit or Implied Targeting, meaning that the platform looked at something that you did give it and derived or guessed something about. And then the third is where there might be a behavioral an observational bent to this data. So LinkedIn may know something about you because of actions you take on the platform, not necessarily what you told it in an open field, or anything that it derived from something else. So each of these targeting types, I'll let you know whether it's derived explicitly, meaning it's going to be very accurate. Or maybe it's implicit, were based off of something you did give the platform, they're gonna make a guess about you, and it won't be as accurate, but likely, you'll get a lot more scale. We'll also talk about inclusion and exclusion in the targeting. Now, inclusion makes audiences smaller and much more targeted in general. I like to think of exclusions as just cutting out the pieces that you don't want. Like if you've ever been cutting a potato or peeling a potato, and it's got a few bad spots. exclusion on LinkedIn is a lot like cutting off those bad spots of the potato. And even just this year, we got access to Boolean targeting, which gives us the ability to specify and targeting or, or targeting now, and they will make your audience tighter, you could say something like, I want this job title, and this company size. And that means you will only get the people who have that exact job title, and are also at a company of that size. If you use or targeting, you're going to make your audiences much broader. And an example here that we've actually used would be something like we want this job title, or if you're a member of this group. And the reason you might want to do that is maybe there aren't enough job titles, or people who own that job title to spend your budget. But maybe if you have that job title, you're just as relevant as someone who went and joined a specific group about that topic that might give you the targeting you want. Back in episode two, we talked about the difference between targeting the right company versus the right individual. And for my experience, most of the time, we're combining these we want the right ideal role in the right type of company. And I like to use the example if you told me your ideal target audience are CFOs, but your product costs $1,200 dollars a month, I would tell you that you are your target audience is certainly CFOs, but not a two person company. So you'd want to combine larger companies that could actually afford what it was you were selling with the right role who would feel that pain point and you'd be able to help them out. The most useful filters for targeting people with roles are job title, job function, which is someone's department, their level of seniority skills on their profile, and groups that their members have. So those are my star five, that's my dream team have role filters. Then you have the company filters that will allow you to target things like company size by number of employees, the industry someone is in or their company is in, as well as company name for you account based marketing advertisers out there. Alright, let's break through each of the different targeting types, starting with geography. Now this is the only required targeting type. LinkedIn from the very beginning has always made you select a geography. So if you don't care about geography, you're okay with this worldwide, then you will have to specifically select all seven continents. This is definitely explicit targeting. On someone's profile, they will list where their geography is and this has recently been updated now with all of Microsoft and Bing's geolocation data. So it used to be that here in the state of Utah, we had two major metro area. There was Salt Lake, Metro up North and Provo Metro down South. And if you didn't want to target one of those two, you just have to target the whole state. Well, now with Microsoft and Bing's break down data, and this is already rolled out, you've already got access to this, you can target all the way down to the specific city, I would expect to have maybe difficulties with targeting people by granular areas like cities, at least for the next few years. Because when people originally set up their profile, they got to choose a metro area. Like for instance, I work with people outside of the state of Utah and all over the world. So even though I don't live right in the city of Salt Lake City, I still live in Salt Lake City metro as it's more recognizable. I actually work in a city called Lehi, which if you know Utah is the tech hub of the state, and I love it, but if you're not familiar, you may question if someone in a city called Lehi is actually good at what they do that this could be some Podunk town out in the sticks, you'd never know. So as long as people are actually updating their profile geography, then targeting all the way down to the city level will make sense In the future, right now, I think there will be a lag of people who originally set up their profile in a metro and haven't yet updated to a specific city. So you'll probably want to target a little bit more broadly, at least until that catches up. Then we get into the matched audiences. Now, there are three different kinds of matched audiences a fourth of you want to get real particular here. And we'll start with an email list upload. Now, this was something we got access to back in 2017. One of my favorite features on the platform, you can upload a CSV or an Excel sheet of up to 300,000 emails. And these can be either raw emails, or they can match a 256 Sha, an encrypted list of how email addresses might be obfuscated. So if you're working with an agency, for instance, and you don't want to give them a list, like let's say your whole customer list, you can export that as a 256 Sha encrypted list and LinkedIn will still take that and be able to recognize it. This is definitely explicit targeting because if you give LinkedIn an email address that they recognize, they will then target that person. And if they don't recognize it, they won't go about trying to target anyone. They're not making any guesses here. This is very, very useful for inclusion purposes. So for instance, if I wanted to target all of my current customers, I could upload this list of email addresses as a matched audience and run targeting against them to tell them about a deal I'm running or something like that. You might be tempted to run this as a suppression list or excluding it. And be aware that it doesn't work great as a suppression list, just because there's oftentimes a pretty low match rate between here's my email address and LinkedIn saying, Oh, yes, I know someone with that email address. I much prefer using company name or what they they'll call account match. As a suppression list. It's going to be a lot more accurate and cover more If your audience. Just like any sort of LinkedIn targeting, you do need at least 300 of the emails on your list to match with LinkedIn. Because you can't target any audience smaller than 300. Personal emails will match at a higher rate, which is great, because a lot of people are more willing to give you personal email addresses. But LinkedIn also does have a great database of people's professional emails. One of the great ways that they do this is if you are working with someone and you've sent them an email, then they can upload their email list into LinkedIn and say, Hey, show me people I'm not connected with already. And LinkedIn will allow them to send invites to people that they've emailed with, even if LinkedIn doesn't know who owns that. So what happens is you've received a connection request from someone over email that says, hey, so and so would like to connect with you. And as soon as you log in to LinkedIn and click accept, LinkedIn goes, Oh, this this personal email address you usually lost. With also matches to this work email address. So whereas on Facebook, you might have a huge personal match rate, but as soon as you upload a business address, it just goes to near zero on LinkedIn, there's going to be a pretty good match rate both with your personal emails, as well as pretty decent on professional. Now LinkedIn will let you know your match rate. But it's going to be pretty broad here, it might say something like 30%. Or maybe you have a list you pulled directly from LinkedIn. So there's theoretically 100% match rate, but they'll just tell you 90% or higher. Now, this makes a lot of sense with email addresses, because you probably wouldn't want someone to be able to tell whether that email address actually matched a LinkedIn profile. That seems like there could be some privacy concerns. 13:48 But as we move on to the next matched audiences feature called account lists or account match, this is actually my favorite matched audience. And this one, the match rate doesn't make quite as much sense, but we'll get into that. You can upload a list of up to 300,000 company names matched. And again, this is explicit targeting. You tell LinkedIn, this company name we want to target. And that person says I work for that company, and therefore the match works. So this is explicit targeting. And I find this feature extremely useful, both as an inclusion for here's a list of companies I really care about, and I want to show specific ads to as well as an exclusion as a suppression list like "Hey LinkedIn, here is a list of all of my competitors, or my current customers or my current and past customers, and any ad I show, I want you to exclude these people from seeing my ads because I'm not going to get any value out of a competitor clicking my ads and charging me money". The gotchas here is that it does require the employee to have claimed working for the company. page. So as long as the employee came into the company after the company page was set up, then this is going to make a lot of sense. It also requires the company to have created a company page. Because if that company page does not exist, and you put in some company name, LinkedIn won't know who to match it to, because they won't see any employees attached to it. This all is dependent on your company page itself. Now, like I mentioned, the match rate here is pretty obfuscated, and it's understandable with personal email addresses, but I get really angry about it when it's around account names. The reason why is because there's no privacy involved in a company name. So if I uploaded a list and let's say I was trying to target IBM, and that didn't match, LinkedIn is only going to tell me that it was 90% or higher matched. And I might have missed the fact that that IBM didn't work, but if I would have typed I. B. M. it would have. So I do wish that LinkedIn would actually give us a specific percentage. And even let us know which account names did not match. But so far that hasn't happened. You can add a web URL for a much better match right here. And I highly recommend that if you can pull a list of your company names, and then in the next column over, you give the URL for that company that would totally solve for that IBM issue I mentioned before, because LinkedIn would go oh, I don't recognize IBM. Oh, but I do recognize ibm.com. Yeah, that map's to I. B. M. 16:41 The third type of matched audience targeting here is retargeting. Now this was one I was really excited for. And like we mentioned in Episode Three retargeting is about to get a lot better, but as of right now, it's it's pretty weak in how it works. It's 100% cookie based retargeting, which means someone has to land on your website that you have control of, and you've placed the LinkedIn pixel. And then their browser has to accept cookies, which as of right now, half of the browsers don't even accept cookies. That's all iOS devices running Safari won't even accept the cookie. And anything running the Mozilla Firefox browser also won't take it. And we know within the next two years, Google Chrome has already announced a sunset around third party cookies. And we also know that Microsoft is never last to the conversation about privacy. And so I'm guessing that Internet Explorer or edge will probably sunset cookies before then. So within about two years, LinkedIn's retargeting won't even work, but that's why the enhancements that they're rolling out with engagement retargeting are so exciting to me. This type of targeting is based on user behavior. It's once you've landed on a page, we're going to stick that cookie on you and make you eligible to be retargeted in the future. Now this is only mildly useful right now for exactly the reasons I talked about. But some additional things. The cookie pool minimum is 300. Because on LinkedIn, you're not allowed to advertise to any audience smaller than 300. So you have to have at least 300 people in that retargeting pool. And because only 50% of browsers accept the cookie, it makes it unreliable as a suppression list. So you might say, if you've clicked on my ad, but didn't convert, now I want to exclude you moving forward. And you could set up that rule, but of course, only 50% of the browser's out there would actually honor it. So you'd still be getting a whole bunch of return traffic there on that campaign. The other benefits that are usually associated with retargeting are that you'll be able to stay top of mind as you remind people about your product or service. Well, people just don't spend that much time on LinkedIn. And they're just not super active in general, it's like three to four log ons per month is average. And so there's not a whole lot of benefit in retargeting people on LinkedIn, just so that they have an opportunity to see your ad three or four times a month. Retargeting is also usually very economical, but on LinkedIn, it's not really the case. We oftentimes see costs lower than $1 per click coming from Facebook and Google's retargeting. And on LinkedIn, it's really rare when we see a retargeting click that's less than about $4. So sure, you'll probably get some kind of discount, but it's usually not big enough to really entice me. 19:36 Then the fourth element here of matched audience targeting is look alikes. Now we waited for look alikes for a long time any of us who have experience with Facebook Ads, the look alike targeting is one of the best technologies Facebook has. So people were screaming for it like "hey, LinkedIn, can you come out with look alikes just like we have on Facebook?". And there just wasn't a good reason for LinkedIn to have look alike functionality, because the original targeting was so good. If you want a look alike, you can just go and say I want to target everyone with that job title. Or you could say if I like targeting that company, I'm going to target all of the companies in its industry or of its size or both. So when LinkedIn acquiesced, and actually gave us look alike targeting, it just wasn't all that useful, because their original targeting was so good originally. So because of that, I do call it mildly useful. It is really good to create a look alike from your customer list where you might not have specific titles or specific types of companies, but you can let LinkedIn make those connections. It's important to understand it's actually based off of the audience expansion functionality that you find in every campaign selected as default, which I'm not a fan of. But what I do like about look alikes is that you can break it out into its own campaign. I never use audience expansion just because it muddies my current audience. But with a look alike, you pretty much get to use the same logic, the same engine that gets you additional people, but you can run it as a whole separate campaign so you can test. This is very much implicit targeting because it's derived from people have likely similar roles and also similar types of companies. And it is very much a black box, we can't see what's happening. Plus on Facebook, we get some really cool functionality this slider bar from one to 10%. Basically how tight do you want this look like to be? Do you want it to be the most precise type of targeting this is really really close. Or are you okay with most of it in there and Facebook can just use a little bit of artistic license to add to it. LinkedIn there's only one setting it's, here's my list, create a look alike from it, and you're you are kind of stuck with whatever it comes up with. If you're doing having any sort of account based marketing approach where you're targeting by company name, do make sure that you have not selected that audience expansion checkbox because you're specifically telling LinkedIn, I want to target just these companies. And then LinkedIn is going "Ooh, I know companies that look like that". And they'll start to broaden your audience, which you obviously don't want. 22:21 Then we move on to the company filters. We talked about how the three major company filters were company name, company size, and company industry. So we'll go through each of those. With company name it's just like account match, where we could upload a list of up to 300,000 company names with a few small intricacies here. First of all, you are limited to only 200 company names per campaign, which is really, really terrible to actually go and type out 200 company names. It will be one of the worst things that you do with your time. But the coolest part about it is if you will do this, you will have a 100% match rate on your company names. Because as you type IBM, LinkedIn will pop up a message that says is this the company you mean, and you can make sure that you're hitting that exact company. If you uploaded that same company list into LinkedIn through a matched audience, it may not have 100% match rate, and LinkedIn wouldn't even tell you which ones you were missing. So if I'm ever targeting fewer than 200 companies per campaign, then I'm going to use this feature just the company name targeting. Now this is explicit. Someone does say I work for this company and LinkedIn goes "Ah, I see that company's company page I know that exists, I can match these up". And I do find this very, very useful. We use company name targeting for account based marketing campaigns all the time. Then company size. This is where you can target a company by the number of employees it has. Some people would like the ability to target by revenue target, for instance. But LinkedIn asks people from the company page, hey, how many employees do you have, and that number becomes gospel. And that's what we are able to target. Because of that it is explicit. The company page owner has to say we are this size of organization for you to be able to target them by their company size. This is very, very useful. We use this all the time. It's how we make sure that we're targeting either the enterprise or small to medium sized businesses or anything in between. The gotchas and nuances here are specifically that most of the companies out there do not have a company page profile, or I guess I'll say it like this. Most LinkedIn members are not linked to a company page where LinkedIn knows their size. So that means if you are using company size targeting, you are probably going to exclude about half of everyone on LinkedIn. Now this number has improved significantly. When I very first got into LinkedIn Ads back in like 2011, it was something like seven times more people did not have a known company size. And now that's only 50/50. That's pretty good. We can actually use this to our advantage, though, because a lot of people are probably using company size targeting. But let's say that you are specifically targeting smaller companies, let's say companies with fewer than 50 employees. Rather than just targeting the companies who are explicitly less than 50 employees. What you can do is exclude all companies that are larger than 50. And what that does is it gives you the companies of the smaller size that you're looking for. But it also gives you all of the unknowns. And the majority of the unknowns are probably from companies with fewer than 50 people. It usually takes a marketing person to say, "hey, we should probably own our profiles across the web". Keep in mind that each person can fit under multiple company sizes because of their multiple positions. So imagine that someone works in an enterprise, a 5,000 and above size company. And maybe they have their own consultancy on the side. Or maybe they're on the board of some nonprofit. And so you might be targeting companies with 5000 or more employees, and then you get a lead from a tiny nonprofit. That can happen sometimes with company size targeting just because each member can be currently connected to more than one company. Make sure you don't use company size as an exclusion just because you're lazy and you don't want to select more checkboxes because anytime you use company size exclusions, you're going to be left with those who are undefined, which tend to be small. Now company industry targeting this is where you can target someone by the industry that they are in or their company is in. Now, that's a really important distinction to make. This is explicit the member on their individual profile gets to choose what industry they're in. And they are also likely associated to a company page. And the company page admin got to select an industry as well. So I might have as my industry, marketing and advertising, but my company might be in high tech or something like that. Same rules apply here that if someone has multiple roles on their profile concurrently, they can also qualify for more than one industry. Not to mention I'm pretty sure they can be targeted by their company's industry and or the industry they claim themselves. In addition to those basic company targeting, there are a couple more that are related to companies. So one's called company followers, and this is where you can reach the followers of your company page. I say your company page, and I mean it. You actually have to have admin access to any company page to be able to use this targeting feature. And I do wish that we could show ads to followers of our competitors, for instance, but we can't do that you have to own the page to either target your own followers or exclude them, which is more often what we're doing with it. And that is pretty explicit as targeting goes. Because if you're either following a company or you're not. This can be really useful for let's say, if you're in the SaaS software industry, it's really nice to show product update ads to the people who are your users of your product. Because that way, when it's time for your contract renewals to come up, you can remind them how good your product was. So hopefully they resign again. I tend to use this mostly as an exclusion, because if someone's already following my company page, they're already seeing my content and oftentimes ads for free anyway. So I might want to just exclude them from my ads so that we're not paying for them. Your ads account does have to be associated with your company page to make this work. Then there's an odd one here called company connections, where you can reach just the first degree connections of any company you select. And companies are only available if they have more than 500 employees. So you're not reaching the employees of that company, you are reaching the first degree connections of the employees, which I can't imagine a case where this would be really incredibly useful. This is of course, explicit targeting, because you're reaching just people who are first level connections and this is very clear data. One good reason I can think of to use this is messing with people. So maybe you want to target a competitors first degree connections and maybe say something bad about the competitor or embarrassed them in some way. And of course, all of these people have a connection to that brand in some way. That could be something you try if that's really your style. But more often than not, but maybe more helpful on a serious note, you could exclude this segment along with your competitors company name, if there's something that you really don't want to get back to a competitor, because you can exclude your competitors from seeing your ads. But maybe one of their connections or one of their good friends sees it and shoots them a screenshot of the ad that they saw their competitor is running, and they might send it to their friend and clue them in. So you can exclude your competitors as well as their first degree connections and really be helpful that that message isn't going to get back to them. 30:52 All right, then you have your age targeting. Now, this is really important to understand that it is an implicit type of targeting It's derived from the date that you started your first position that you claim on your profile. This is important to understand because no one ever put in their birthdate into LinkedIn, it'd be pretty easy for them to ask that when they sign up. But no one ever did that. And so LinkedIn is gonna look at it and say, ah, people usually start to graduate from college around the age of, let's call it 22 or something. And that means when you start your first position, you're probably 22 around that time, and we can calculate how old you are. This can be pretty inaccurate, especially because you'll find some people who go "uh, my earlier career experience wasn't related to marketing or wasn't really wasn't related to sales, so I'm just going to leave that stuff off of my profile", and then all of a sudden, LinkedIn thinks that you're 12 years old. So I try not to use this facet unless I absolutely need to. And it is pretty broad anyway. Then you've got gender which is also implicit. It's really interesting because of how wrong this can be. It only has two categories, male or female, I think they'll probably give additional categories in the future just to be sensitive to transgender. But this is derived based off of a probability of someone's first name being either a masculine or a feminine name. So we have a client whose name is Lenny. And it's a man his name is is Lenny. But he gets ads all the time, like, "Hey, are you a female executive?" And he's like, "No, definitely not". So I would call gender maybe mildly useful, I would imagine it's probably, I don't know, 90ish% accurate. So I try not to use it unless I absolutely have to realizing that because it's just a guess based off of someone's first name, there will be a little bit of spillover in both directions. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break and then we'll dive into the rest of the targeting options. 32:53 The LinkedIn Ads show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. 33:02 That's right you know it, B2Linked is the LinkedIn Ads focused agency. We manage many of LinkedIn's largest spending accounts worldwide and our official LinkedIn partners. Contact us on B2linked.com to get in touch, and our team can help you enact these and other strategies to get you the very best. 33:20 Alright, let's jump into the rest of the targeting options. So next we have degrees. Now, this is explicitly derived from the profile. When you go to add education, it will ask you what your degree is. And I would say in the Higher Ed segment, this is a really, really useful and important type of targeting. As a gotcha though, there are so many degree names. You can have a Bachelor of Science in marketing, a Bachelor of Arts and marketing and a bajillion of other options. So be aware there. If you are specifically trying to target one type of person, you'll probably want to type in something like for instance, if you're going after marketers, you'll type in marketing or you'll type in bachelor's, and then just scroll through that big list trying to find anything that is relevant. Next is field of study. This is also explicitly added from your profile when you add an education. You get to say what you studied. So for me, it was marketing, I studied marketing. And this can be really helpful for Higher Ed types of targeting. And there are so many different fields of study. So be aware, again, like degrees, you'll probably be trying to target by a lot of different variations. Then you've got schools, again, this is an education. This is explicit, someone says I went to this University, and it is optional to add, but most people probably do, I think most are pretty proud of their school and their degree, so they will add it even if optional. 34:46 Then we get into some of my very favorite targeting criteria here. These are the ones that are helpful for targeting the individual. So job function is the department that someone works in. They say they call it job. function in my mind, I just tell myself department. And this is derived from several different things in a profile. LinkedIn told me they are in the process of updating and changing how this is done. But at least when I was informed about it many, many years ago, this was derived from your job title, your industry, and I believe it was skills, but it might have been something else. So they match those three, three things together and try to figure out what departments you fit in. Each member can have multiple from a single position. So let's say your job title is Chief Financial Officer or CFO, LinkedIn looks at that and goes, Oh, well, you are 100% in the finance job function, but we're also going to put you at 16% in the business development function, which is what a lot of C Executives fit into. So you can have one person fit multiple departments or job functions. Because this is pulled from some other things in your profile like your title, your industry and skills, that does make it implicit, which means it's a little bit less accurate. But it is LinkedIn's broadest targeting. And we find this to be really helpful in combination with other elements, like company name, for instance. So if I ever tried to overlay job title on top of company name, I would likely not hit nearly as many people on my audience size as I wanted to. But because job function is so broad, I love it in conjunction with other types of targeting that make it quite tight. Now, here's a nuance that you won't know until you go and try to do it. And then LinkedIn tells you you can't, you can't combine job function and job title in almost any way. That means as inclusions or exclusions, and that is because job function is derived from job title. So they look at it and go well, you can't exclude one from the other because they come from the same pot. Something interesting that we found out when LinkedIn came out with the segment breakdown several months ago, where you can look at audiences and see what LinkedIn categorizes them as we did the job title of CEO, and then went to go look at the job function of a CEO, because we've always been curious, like, what is a CEO? What is what department does the does LinkedIn think that it fits into, and CEOs are near 100% business development, which is odd to me, it didn't make sense, but I'm glad that I at least know. And of course, that opened it up to us learning a lot more about how LinkedIn categorizes these job functions. For another example here, sales manager job title, if you go into segment breakdown, LinkedIn calls them 98% sales, but 6% operations 5% business development, 4% marketing and 2% support, which is odd that they would have such small percentages. I would imagine that they are those percentages in certain industries, which tells us why they're so low 38:01 Then you have seniority and seniority we use almost all the time. It is a fantastic filter. And it is also implicit from your job title. It's derived from the perceived level of your job title. This is really easy when you have something like a manager, director, VP kind of title, but obviously more nebulous if you have something like specialist, analyst, consultant, those types of things. We find this one extremely useful. We use it all the time like I sai. There are quite a few gotchas and nuances with the job seniority filter, for instance, one of the options is unpaid. And I just wonder from the job title, how do they know that they're unpaid? If you go into segment breakdown, LinkedIn says the majority of unpaid jobs in your 30s have at least 12 years of experience. So and that's 15% of them was the biggest amount in that list. And so I look at it and go "wait, does that mean that they're categorizing CEOs or really senior people as unpaid"? It didn't seem like it jive to me. Then they have training again, I wonder how do they know that someone is in training 61% of people in training are in education. And then if you look at the years of experience 9% of training are in the 12 or more years of experience bucket. And then there's 7% in the 1, 2, 3, 4 years of experience bucket. So I wonder if they're training, what's this connection, two years of experience. And then there's entry level. 22% of entry level are registered with over 12 years of experience. So again, I maybe I'm wondering a little bit about that. Not quite sure how accurate it would be. Then senior, so many people get senior wrong as a seniority. What it means is when I think senior, I think individual contributors. This is someone who manages projects and things, but not people. And the thing everyone gets wrong. They go, "oh yeah, we're targeting senior managers or senior directors or senior VPS". That's not what it means. It doesn't mean you have a senior in your title, it means that you are an individual contributor. And then I look at that and go wait 36% of senior seniorities have 12 plus years of experience. So again, years of experience seems maybe unreliable at this point. 40:28 There's a manager seniority, which we end up using a lot. LinkedIn calls this a people manager. And I again, I wonder if you have manager in your title, how does LinkedIn know that you manage people and not just projects and things? Something interesting if you're looking at manager seniority, 4% of those people are also in Director, 3% are also owners, 2% are VPS, so again, that breakdown maybe leaves me with some more questions than I had before. Director, VP, CXO all of those make pretty good sense to me. And when I looked at owner as a seniority, it's like CEO because it's near 100% business development as a job function. I thought that was interesting. Partner, I oftentimes will equate owner and partner together. Partners are qualified as 57% business development and 53% entrepreneurship. So I guess that makes sense. It's just interesting to see how LinkedIn slices it. Okay, then we have job titles. Now, because your job title is a free form field, you can write whatever you want in there. And so LinkedIn is attempting to look at your title and understanding and equate it to other people's titles to try to build this model around it and understand which job titles make sense. When you look at it, though, LinkedIn only understands about 30% of the job titles out there. So that means that when you're using this targeting facet 70% of your audience won't be reachable with this. It is explicit and it's going to be very accurate because someone really had to closely match a job title for LinkedIn to understand it. We find this to be really useful. And we use it around a lot around roles. In fact, we probably use this with every single client, we are usually running a job title campaign for a role. Through the API, we queried and found that there are 30,223, so just over 30,000 unique titles on LinkedIn. And there are other known titles that roll up under those, which means your LinkedIn has 30,000 that you can type in and it will match that there are a whole bunch of others that LinkedIn says roll up to that that we can't see. What's been interesting to me for a long time is you know, here in marketing I know a lot of people who have PPC or demand Gen in their job title. And I've been waiting for like nine years now for when I type in PPC or demand Gen into a job title that LinkedIn will match with something. So LinkedIn tells me that they would roll up under things like digital marketing. But because I can't see it, I just don't know if maybe their index is really old, they're not looking at more current titles, maybe it's not updated very often. Or maybe LinkedIn understands all of these titles fantastically and I just don't know. Because most marketers go to LinkedIn because of the job title targeting, it's the first thing they they go to, it's the first thing they try out. This does tend to be some of the most competitive inventory out there. And because LinkedIn only understands about 30% of job titles, that means that there's diminished audience inventory, but demand for that inventory is higher, because this is job title targeting that people really like to use. So because of that job title targeting is going to be some of the most expensive targeting that you do. And you just expect it's going to be very accurate. It's going to give you more or less smaller audience sizes, and it's going to cost more, but probably give you very good lead quality. If you're targeting standard job titles like sales manager, HR manager, you'll probably capture the majority of them. Those are very easy titles for LinkedIn to understand. But then that also means that those are very easily reachable for less money with something like job function, and seniority. And because members can have multiple positions listed concurrently on their profile, let's say something like you work for a fortune 500 in the daytime, but you're also on the board of a nonprofit or you do consulting on the side so you have both titles currently running. That also means that you can qualify as multiple job titles. Then we have skills, another one we use all the time. These are explicit because each member can claim up to 50 skills on their profile when they sign up. And these are always things you can go and edit later. They are more specific than job title. So for instance, I might have the job title of digital marketing manager but I think might be really highly specialized in LinkedIn Ads, or Google Ads or Facebook Ads. So those types of ads, the channels themselves would be under skills quite easily. But I couldn't reach that person just from their job title, unless I wanted to go broader, like digital marketing manager that really could be managing anything, anything paid organic, social search, whatever. It does aid and giving us broad audiences. And so it is very, very useful. Also, for things like overlaying on top of lists of companies for ABM lists, this can be great for that. As for the nuances here, each member can have up to 50. But it's also not the strongest signal. So for instance, I took a SQL class one time SQL, a database class, and because of that, I put SQL as a skill on my profile, but certainly you wouldn't want to try to sell me a database management software. It's not what I do primarily. It's just one thing. I was proud of I liked. If you wanted to try to target people like me who might have a job title of ad specialist or PPC something, because there's no PPC job title skills can be a great way to reach someone like me who maybe LinkedIn just didn't understand their job title. One thing I would absolutely love, people claim skills and you can endorse each other, you've probably done this a lot, you've probably received a lot of endorsements. I wish that we could either bid up bid higher on people who had more endorsements on certain skills, the ones that were bidding on, and maybe even ignore, if you only have three or fewer endorsements around a skill, maybe I don't want to target you. And that would be really cool. I've given this feedback to LinkedIn, please give it to your reps as well. I think that'd be awesome. Skills, back in the day used to be free form and I think this was probably sometime around 2014 when this changed, you could write any skill you want. So we used to play jokes with this, we would nominate other people in assigned skills like snowboarding to to friends trying to get them things like contracts or influence or attention in sports. So now they have enough skills out there that you're kind of forced, there are a certain number of skills you can put in. I don't know how often these are updated. I don't know how often they add new skills. But certainly this is something that you're kind of closed into a box now. 47:21 Years of experience is another pretty interesting one. Again, just like age, this is implicitly drawn from the date you started your first claim position. The definition would be the number of years you've been in the professional world realize that it's only mildly useful because it is very implicit and you just never know how accurate it's going to be. I think rather than age or years of experience that seem very prone to error, I would much rather use seniority that doesn't seem nearly as prone to error. Then groups I absolutely love groups targeting. Now don't mistake this. This is targeting people who are members of certain groups, it doesn't mean that your ads are going to be shown when they're logged into the group, I get that question quite a bit. This is very explicit. In fact, you have to go way out of your way on LinkedIn right now to join a group. And I don't think LinkedIn is very proud of their group's product right now because you really, really have to go out of your way. If you're searching for a group, you've got to get like four clicks deep before you're ever even seeing an option for groups. I think this is very, very useful. Because if you're passionate enough about a topic to go and join a group all about it, you're probably really relevant to what I'm trying to sell you. Back when LinkedIn was really proud of their group's product, and they were really highly used. A lot of people joined groups and then kind of forgot about them, and they're still part of it, which is great. It means when I use group targeting, I'm going to have larger audience sizes, but realize that may not be quite as up to date. And because fewer people are members of groups, these will usually give you a smaller audience sizes. 48:59 Then you have member interests. There are currently 11 broad interests, and then they break down into a bunch of more micro and niche interests. It's interesting that these are part of the third category of how targeting is determined. These are part of the behavioral or observed category. The way they do it is looking at what you interact with in the feed. So subjects that you're posting on subjects that you are completing social actions on, like liking, commenting, and resharing. And if they can get the data from you, if you do any sort of searches on Bing, they will pull from your Bing search history to try to figure out what you're interested in. I think this is not very useful. I don't use interests a whole lot it just because of how broad they are and how prone to error. My big question is, what does someone have to do to be labeled as interested in a certain topic? Is it like you hit the like button once on a post about that topic? Or do you have to comment three times? Or is it a single search on Bing? Is it 15 searches on Bing with a keyword?, we just don't know this. So I would suggest using it for things like paring down an audience when there just isn't a reason for you to be targeting a million people. But your targeting isn't tight enough to get it down to like a very small group, we might overlay interests just to give yourself a better shot. It's also really interesting to look at your audience's interests just to see how much faith that you are willing to put in. So what you could do is put in the job title of someone that you're trying to target, then you look in the right rail under the breakdown, the segment breakdown, and look under interests just to see does it jive? Are you targeting developers and there's a ton of stuff about like Bitcoin? Maybe that's maybe that makes sense. If you're targeting developers, and there's a ton about travel or Instagram influencers or something like that, I wouldn't have as much faith in it. 50:56 Then you've got some new stuff called member traits. Now Member traits used to be something called custom segments that was beta targeting that you only got access to, if you had a LinkedIn Rep. And what's really cool is they're starting to slowly roll these out. And at one point, there was something like 30, or 40 different custom segments that your LinkedIn rep had access to. And now I think they've released maybe four or five of them. And I hope they keep going. I think these are so so cool. They are also behavioral and observed types of facets. But what's so cool about them is LinkedIn knows a lot about you because of your behavior on the platform. And so I feel like these are a lot more trustworthy. There's still tons that haven't been released yet. So definitely ask your rep if they have any ideas for custom segments that might be good for the audience that you go after. There's one called frequent contributor, obviously, I don't know what their baseline is for how many times you have to post or comment on something to be a frequent contributor, but it's there. This There's one called frequent traveler. And I think they know because if you're on the mobile app and you log into LinkedIn, from IP addresses that go across the country across the globe, they know that you're a business traveler. There's one called job seeker that this one makes a lot of sense. If someone has viewed at least three job postings, or applied to any one of them. LinkedIn goes, "ah, they're looking for a job", so you can target them pretty easily. There's one called open to education. There's one called device preference. And device preference is really interesting to me. I don't know where we're all the way there yet. But it'll break down into do they prefer desktop or mobile for their LinkedIn experience. And under mobile, you can actually break down to iOS and Android. It is called preference and it doesn't mean the device they're on. I believe this just means the the device that they tend to use the most often, so not quite as accurate as I have liked, but certainly that gets us closer. I certainly expect more coming out here because there's a lot of custom segments we've used in the past that aren't in the list yet. As for how useful these are, it really is a yard sale or a garage sale, whatever you want to call it, where you just have to look at the list and maybe something applies. Maybe something doesn't. It's really unorganized or disorganized. But there's lots of good options, maybe something is a good fit for you. So check that those out. Then you have something called audience templates. Now, audience templates are different from our member traits, because they don't involve anything that's behavioral. These are just templates that LinkedIn has built for you that make it easier to target certain types of people. So for instance, there's one that's expertise in Bitcoin. And if you actually apply this, you see that all LinkedIn did is they just automatically applied all of the Bitcoin and blockchain groups targeting. Then there's financial advisors and then all they did was added all of the job titles that financial advisors seem to have, and added some finance industries on to it, you can choose IT decision makers, but this is just job function of IT with a seniority of like manager and above. There's nurses, there's medical doctors, these are ones that mostly rely on job title. There's also degrees which you can exclude, which is really helpful for Higher Ed. This one, again, is kind of a yard sale, you don't know if there's going to be something that fits your audience or not until you look and there's 26 out there right now. So check those out when you get a chance. 54:37 So my recommendations for you as you're designing your targeting, use explicit as much as you possibly can. This is going to give you the highest lead quality, it's going to be the most precise, and this is so much of the reason why we like LinkedIn is this precision in targeting. So when you need quality, go explicit on your targeting options, and then use the implicit ones, when you just need volume, and you're okay with a little bit of error. Most of the time, you're going to need a little bit of a mix. And I really like testing these targeting methods against each other. For instance, if I have an audience like sales manager, I'm probably going to test job title of sales manager, and job function of sales with manager seniority against each other. And I want these in two separate campaigns. And I want to see which one gives me more volume, lower cost, better efficiency down the funnel. Because I understand the need for quality versus volume. And it's kind of a sliding scale in most cases, I would use job function with seniority on an ABM list on an account list anytime. But if I'm just using LinkedIn's native targeting to reach every one of this role in North America, I'd be much more likely to use job titles or even groups that really narrow it down. Alright, so I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around 56:04 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 56:15 All right, here are the resources for this week. Anyone looking to get into LinkedIn Ads check out course that I did with LinkedIn Learning. The link is right there in the show notes. I've said this on previous episodes, but it covers about the first hour and a half of the trainings that I give people one on one and charge $500 an hour for and I think it's only $25 bucks so it's a great value. Definitely check that out. That will get you up to speed in LinkedIn Ads pretty quick. It's also free if you have LinkedIn premium. 56:45 On whatever podcast player you are on right now. Please look down and hit that subscribe button and please consider rating and reviewing. I would love any sort of attention you could give this podcast and certainly the offers always on the table. Reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with any feedback, anything in the future you'd like us to feature talk about, discuss, or dive into. And we will see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Show resources: Conversation Ads Release Content Friction Funnel Slide Listables checklists – Listables.com Hushly – Hushly.com Chris Dayley – CRO consultant LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you’d like AJ to cover. Transcript: Absolutely positively the most important element in your LinkedIn Ads. We’re talking about it today. 0:12 Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here’s your host, AJ Wilcox. 0:19 Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics, the most important part of your whole LinkedIn Ad strategy is your offer. Now the offer is whatever you’re asking your target audience to do. Sometimes advertisers will ask prospects to do things like “hey, read a blog post”, or “download a piece of content” or “buy something now”, or even “hop on the call with a sales rep”. So let’s dive deep into what offers work on LinkedIn Ads, and which don’t. Let’s hit it. As for the news, LinkedIn announced a new ad format called conversation ads. Now because this episode airs a few weeks after it’s recording, it should be available to everyone listening. These use the same inventory as message ads, what they just rebranded as from sponsored in mail, and it’s much more versatile. It feels like a conversation a lot more than message ads, which feel like cold outreach. So check out the link in the show notes for a little bit more about the release, we had really good success with these, we were part of the the early pilot with one of our clients, and it ended up going really, really well. We’re really happy with it. So definitely check out that ad format as you get a chance if there’s a good use for it. Okay, so here’s the rub on offers. You can buy ad space anywhere, and you can ask anyone to do anything, but it certainly doesn’t mean that they’re likely to do it. You could ask people to buy your teleportation machine from your new storefront on Mars, but you’ll definitely have a zero percent conversion rate, which would be actually good because if someone did buy you wouldn’t have anything to give them. So there are all kinds of different things you can ask someone to do from an offer. I’ve seen a lot of companies ask for a buy now or talk to sales, or take a trial of certain kind of software, download a piece of content, come to an in-person event, read a blog post, listen to a podcast episode even. And what influences someone as to whether they’ll be actually interested in converting on whatever you’re asking them to do from your offer totally depends on their mindset and your relationship with them. So if someone is actively searching for something, let’s say they’re searching on Google, or they came to your website to fill out a contact form, then they’re definitely ready to buy and you really can cut right to the chase. They’re asking you for something and you can just give that to them. And then we have these audiences that we call warm audiences where the audience already knows, likes, and trusts them. Maybe they’ve been subscribed to your newsletter for a long time or they regularly consume your content. That means that anything you ask, they’re probably going to be receptive to it, and they’ll give you the benefit of doubt. They will oftentimes be willing to take an action that a cold audience would not. And that’s simply because you’ve built up goodwill with them. But then when you have an audience that doesn’t know who you are, we call them a cold audience, you still have to earn their trust. And this is where LinkedIn usually sits. I picture that every impression from my LinkedIn ads go out to someone who has never heard of me before. This is the first time a member has ever heard of my client or heard of my company before. So if you have a cold audience, you really do have to lead with something that’s either going to increase their know like and trust factor, or you have to lead with something that is so incredibly attractive to them, that they are willing to jump to the middle of your funnel, rather than the top to get to know you to consume this information. If you happen to already have a strong brand, let’s say it’s your one of the Fortune 500 then the majority of your audience already knows who you are and you can cheat a little bit, you can ask more from people than they would normally give from a cold audience because you’ve already built up goodwill and name recognition with them over the years. So 95% of the time, if you go and put out a demo request ad, or a free trial, or a Buy Now, in your LinkedIn ads, it will fail. We’ve found about 95% of the time, it totally falls flat. What that failure means is we will see low click through rates that turned into really high costs per click. And then the clicks that we do get turn out to have really low conversion rates, oftentimes between about one and a half to 4%. It will feel like pulling teeth trying to get LinkedIn to give you traffic, and therefore you’ve got this inability to scale. That means that you could spend all of your budget now which is great, but if in two months, your boss comes to you and says let’s double down. Let’s spend more this channels work in great, you won’t be able to scale because LinkedIn just won’t give you the traffic, you’re not earning it. I say 95% of the time that fails, but the other 5% of the time. The exception here is that when you’re offering something that’s so Earth shatteringly disruptive that people have been waiting for it, they’re chomping at the bit. I’ve got an example from a client who ran a helicopter taxi service. And it was so funny, I was sure that this was just going to fail miserably. But asking people to sign up for like a lift ride, but in a helicopter, that was really expensive. We had from a hard offer asking people to immediately book a helicopter taxi ride, we had 17% conversion rates, which were incredible. These are what I would consider bottom of the funnel purchase behavior that we were getting at the rate of like downloading a white paper or something. It was incredible. So sure, I am totally floored and surprised 5% of the time when this works, but so 95% of the time I’m just predicting, yep, when I asked too much too soon, it’s probably going to fail. So when you choose to force it, you choose to force people who don’t know who you are, you don’t have a relationship with them to go immediately to the bottom of the funnel, we regularly see $400 to $1,000 per lead, which is incredible, because I’m amazed that anyone would pay that much for a lead. But certainly if it’s working, that’s great. I wish them well. But when you have the right offer for your audience, magic happens. LinkedIn Ads sits in this really interesting place in the market, where it’s priced like it’s the bottom of the funnel, kind of ad traffic, but it’s traffic that acts like it’s top of funnel. And if you move forward to an audience and you give them something of real value, they are willing to jump from the top of the funnel to the middle of the funnel, and they will give you their contact info. LinkedIn is so good at getting in front of your exact target audience. These are the most highly valuable people that you could get your business message in front of. So what you want to do is give them an offer that they are so incredibly excited about. It’s something that adds a ton of value. And what they will do, then this is your ideal target audience. By the way, they will click on your ads at a much higher than average rate, which results in tons of volume at lower costs than LinkedIn is normally going to give you traffic. It’s not uncommon for us to be able to pay below LinkedIn’s floor price, when we have excellent content offers. They also convert at 15% or higher, which results in really low costs per opt in. Some of our better ones are between $25 to $40 per opt in. And that’s awesome, especially when you compare that to companies who are paying $400 to $1,000 per bottom of funnel lead when you’re not leading with value first. So the economics here, the way that this works out, you’re willing to pay $25 to $40 per opt in. And that means for the same price that you paid for one lead, one phone call when you were trying to force people to the bottom of the funnel for 400 to $1,000, you now have 20 plus contacts, who are your most valuable target audience, and they are ready to be nurtured by email, ready to be reached out to by sales, ready to be nurtured with other retargeting ads. They’ve also consumed your content and interface somewhat with your brand. So they’re starting to know, like, and trust you, which is exactly what we need to take a cold audience and turn it into a warm one. What we found is usually about 10% to 20% of these opt ins will be open to hopping on a call with sales. So if you follow the math, would you rather have a single demo request for $400? Or would you have rather have one to four demos booked along with 10 to 20 names in your database, all with goodwill pointing towards you. That’s exactly why gated offers works so well on LinkedIn and why I recommend everyone use them. I built a model that I call the offer friction funnel, and it shows the relative friction of each type of offer each type of ask that you could give someone. And I’m actually putting a link to this in the show notes. So definitely open it up wherever you are. And I want you to take a look at it because it’s a little hard to describe a visual just over audio here, but I’ll try. It’s shaped like a funnel where the top is wide and the bottom is narrow, which we’re used to with funnel imagery. And the top tend to be offers that are lower in friction, meaning that more people are willing to do them especially cold audiences. And at the bottom, we see offers that are much higher in friction that people are less likely or willing to do. Now your conversion rate will generally follow the level of friction so low friction offers at the top will tend to convert at a higher rate and higher friction offers at the bottom will tend to convert lower. Totally make sense. The one exception here is that the very top of the funnel, you’ll see is like blog posts and infographics. And those are very low friction, because you’re asking, “Hey, come and read this blog post”. And there’s very little risk for your visitor in doing that. If they get to your blog post, and they read a paragraph or two and decide they don’t want to be there anymore, they can just leave the page and all they sacrificed was a little bit of their time. But those blog posts and infographics, they very naturally have a very weak call to action, meaning that if you’re actually measuring a conversion rate from that content, it will be very, very low or maybe even non existent. So that’s why we talk about friction being from low to high instead of just talking about conversion rates, because at the very top of the funnel, you won’t have a conversion rate. But as soon as you gate something as soon as you start asking for someone’s information. That’s when you start to see conversions. I get asked all the time, what is the content? What is the style of content, the medium that gets the highest conversion rates? Essentially these companies asking what should I build? Well, I’ll let you know, the real value is not what the content is, it’s the promise of what they’ll be able to do once they’ve consumed it. I’ll repeat that, again. Because it’s really important. It’s the promise of what someone will be able to do once they’ve consumed your content that makes them more or less likely to convert. To prove this, we did a study where we took the same report from one of our clients, and we broke it into a one page checklist, a seven page guide, and a 30 page ebook, and we advertised all of them to the same audiences. And what was so interesting to us time and time again, when we’ve done these studies, we noticed that they all have relatively similar conversion rates. So regardless of the medium that someone chose, it was just as valuable because we weren’t advertising, you know, this one’s a guide because of that you should get it. There’s probably some of that built in. But it was the promise, here’s what you’re going to be able to do, Here’s the value that you’re going to get out of this offer, once you consume it. And if it happens to be a 30 page ebook, there will be some people who love reading, and they will be willing to download it because of that. There will be certain people in your audience who go, I don’t have time to read an ebook, and so they’ll forego, but it’ll average out all about the same. So the goal here then, is to go out and build your content around something that your audience would find extremely valuable. Don’t go and build an ebook just because someone told you to go build an ebook, build it for a purpose to actually provide value. Okay, here’s a quick sponsored break. And then we’re going to jump into the different types of offers and what we’ve seen work and not 12:59 The LinkedIn Ad show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts 13:08 B2Linked is the LinkedIn Ads focused agency. We manage many of LinkedIn’s largest accounts worldwide, and we are official LinkedIn partners. So contact us on B2Linked.com to get in touch, and our team will help you enact these and other strategies to get you the best performance for your money. All right, let’s jump into the different types of offers. 13:30 We’ve talked about what happens when you go too deep into the funnel too soon. When you’re asking for a demo, asking for a trial, or asking for a purchase, those things to a cold audience just are very, very rare when they work. But you have these gated offers that are kind of in between where you’re giving value first, and all you’re asking them for is some of their personal information to be able to follow up with them, to be able to nurture them. So let’s go through each type of gated offer and from my experience what I’ve found to be a pro and con of each and what works and what doesn’t work. So very first off checklists, I love checklists. They work really well with advanced professionals, as well as beginners. Because advanced, people want to know if they’ve missed any of the checklist items. So something like “hey, the 11 things that every LinkedIn ads account needs”. If you’re a total LinkedIn Pro, you’re probably still willing to download that asset, just to see like, Oh, yeah, I probably know 10 of them. But it’s probably worth my time to figure out that 11. And, of course, if you’re a total beginner, you’re going to look at that and say that sounds like a resource I’ll want to learn, because I really should know all 11 items that LinkedIn advertisers need to know. And of course, this is just an example I don’t actually have a piece of content called the 11 items that every LinkedIn advertiser needs to know, but maybe I’ll look to create something like that. A checklist also feels really easy to consume. So it feels low risk to a prospect. You could very quickly look over it, find the one or two items that you need, and then move on, it didn’t take 30 minutes from your day. I also really like this idea of interactive checklists, meaning that people will keep it around digitally. And they love to check things off. So there’s a company out there called listables.com that does this and I’ll throw a link in the resources, where people will keep an interactive checklist around, just so people will continue to stay top of mind digitally, and their prospects will want to come back and tick things off as they complete them. All right, the next one is a cheat sheet. And think of this like a resource that people will hang up in their offices or cubicles with your branding on it. The best example for this was early on in my career, I followed a company called Moz, religiously, moz.com. And this was when I was really into search engine optimization or SEO. They had the SEO developers cheat sheet or something like that. And I remember it was a pretty PDF, I printed it off, and I kept it up in my cubicle for like five years, I had something Moz related always up in my office or cubicle. And it felt really high value to me. And it was really easy for me to consume to use as a resource. And of course, that built a lot of goodwill with me. Then you’ve got resources like guides, and the feeling you get with a guide is I’m going to hold your hand and walk you through something that you don’t already know how to do. And so it feels highly educational, it feels helpful, and it feels pretty simple to consume because you’re going to walk them through step by step. Then there’s white papers and white papers. This is a pretty old term. And think of them like long form content designed to promote the products or services from a specific company. I pulled that definition from investopedia. I didn’t come up with that one on my own. But I think white papers really depend on the promise because if this is essentially a product brochure, no one is willing to give you their email address. And first name last name in exchange for a company brochure. That’s the kind of stuff that should be made free. So make sure if you are really designing a white paper to be a white paper, make sure you’re leading with the value to them. Then you have ebooks. I think as a not great reader myself, I just get so bored when I’m reading books. And so that’s why I love podcasts and audiobooks so much. But I perceive when someone is pitching me an ebook that it’s going to take me a lot of time to consume, and that might turn people like me off, it might make it less likely to get consumed. So certainly try an ebook. But you might also take exactly the same content and package it up as a guide and see if that increases your conversion rates because people might see it being a little bit less friction or a little less difficult to consume. Then webinars. Oh man, I still love webinars for years. I’ve wondered when people are going to stop signing up for it and consuming webinars, but they just keep going. Webinars are so interesting. Of all of the different gated content I’m telling you about, webinars are the one thing that really stands out to be really nuanced. If you want to follow someone who is brilliant about webinars, go and follow Daniel Wass, his last name is spelled Waas. He’s German. He has some of the best content about webinars I’ve ever seen. He spoke at the Inbound conference back in 2019 about it, and I took so many notes during his his presentation, I felt like my hand was gonna fall off. So anyone doing webinars, make sure to go and consume his content. But here’s what’s so interesting to me about webinars, about 50% of the people who sign up won’t attend, but at some point, they put their name on the list because you are offering to solve a problem that they need solved. So even though only 50% will show up. The other 50% are definitely still marketable. So don’t write them off, continue to market to them. Now the 50%, who do show up, now they know like and trust you more than if they’d read five white papers of yours. They have heard you speak, they’ve gotten the goodwill from you sharing content that’s helpful to them, as long as the webinar was good and helpful. And now they’re going to have a much higher likelihood of closing in your sales cycle. Many signups will expect to just watch the replay so they don’t have an intent of actually showing up live. But when you do a live webinar, you can really stoke this, this FOMO this fear of missing out and this urgency that the fact that because it’s live, they’re going to miss it if they don’t put it on their calendar. I’ve seen a lot of advertisers try to use on demand webinars just because they take so many fewer resources. And what I found is your conversion rate drops on signup and your attendance rate is also much lower as well. So certainly you saved the time of yours to create content. But people see right through it, it loses that fear of missing out, it loses the urgency, because they know that they can consume it anytime. And it spurs them to inaction. So my recommendation, if you are currently using on demand, or you’re trying to use an on demand type of webinar, try just performing it live, give yourself a good three weeks ramp period to advertise it on LinkedIn, and see if you can have better results pushing towards a live webinar. Obviously, it’s more work. But if it turns out that you’re getting a much lower cost per lead, and you have a higher attendance rate of people willing to come and talk to your sales team, then it’ll be well worth your time. I found that free in-person events tend to work really well as well. And there’s a ton of urgency and FOMO on the side of the prospect here as well, because they know that there’s going to be some event that they’re not going to be a part of if they forget to put it on their calendar, and they’ll miss it. Oftentimes, there’s opportunities to network with their peers, get drinks, have food, get educated on a topic that they may care about. So I’d realize this is a ton of work to put together an in person event. But these work very well as an offer on LinkedIn. They feel very VIP. People feel really special. And so this will work especially well with message ads, with conversation ads, and with sponsored content. It’ll feel special. I get asked a lot about case studies as well. Case studies to me are surprisingly bottom of funnel even though it is something like gated content, or might be viewed by your marketing department as gated content. But to a prospect, you’re most likely not willing to download a case study and even care about the contents until you’re already considering working with that company. So if you’re not already in this consideration, phase of working with someone, meaning you would be a warm audience anyway, you’re probably not going to be interested in a case study. So what we found is to a cold audience, a case study may have a really low conversion rate. And you might get high costs, like it’s a bottom of the funnel type of asset, even though it really is content. So I don’t generally like to lead with case studies, that might be a good retargeting type of asset. 22:23 Similar to in person events, online summits can work quite well, especially because it’s the ability to run an in person event, but be able to get many, many more people because everyone’s virtual and technology is cheap. So getting someone into a big online summit with LinkedIn Ads, as a cold audience would probably be just as simple as trying to book them onto a webinar. So then you’ve got the things that are a little bit lower in the funnel, like a demo request, people expect a sales pitch, and so they’re not going to do a demo request until they’re getting pretty serious. So that’s pretty bottom of funnel. You might be able to get a few people to do it, but without that know like and trust factor built up, it’s probably going to be a very small percentage of the population leading to high costs per, and then really low conversion rates. 23:14 Free trials are pretty similar, unfortunately, because people know that there’s a big time investment into trying out a product. There’s also a huge pain in the rip and replace of a software solution. And so people dread it, they don’t want to get involved in a new trial. Doesn’t matter how attractive the trial is, or how “easy” it’s going to be for them to try. It’s a lot of work up front, meaning that this likely won’t convert with a cold audience very well. Although it might do better than a demo request, you might get a slightly higher conversion rate. And of course, asking someone directly for a purchase, this is really difficult to a cold audience and this just isn’t for LinkedIn. This is for any cold audience. Asking someone for a purchase if they are a previous customer or an existing warm audience who already has that know, like, and trust factor, those can work, okay. But this is too much to ask from a cold audience. And whether you’re selling a product that costs $2 or $2,000. Both are really problematic on LinkedIn. Because if you’re asking for something that’s cheap, let’s say it’s $2, you’ll never be able to overcome LinkedIn’s high costs to make a return on that investment. And if the cost is high, if it’s $2,000, then maybe you can recoup the cost from LinkedIn. But because it’s expensive conversion rates going to be really low and unlikely you’ll get enough people who actually will do the action. So that’s a walkthrough of pretty much all of the offers that I see regularly being used on LinkedIn. And my biggest recommendation here is to call the offer whatever you want, because as soon as everyone starts using a tactic, it ceases to work. You probably remember 20 years ago when people started offering, every company had a free consultation, and it probably worked really well back then. But now because everyone does it, it doesn’t feel special anymore. And it’s hard to actually spur someone to action with an offer that feels like everyone else is doing this too. So maybe try calling it something like a free Strategy Session or a free Power Hour. Change things up a little bit and make it feel a little bit more special. Okay, so you’re sold on this, you know that coming up with a really valuable offer is the best thing that you can do for your LinkedIn Ads program. So now you need to come up with this content offer because this hasn’t occurred to you before. My recommendation is to go and meet with people in your team who interface with customers all the time. Oftentimes, this is sales. And you go and sit down with them and find out what are the most frequently asked questions that are keeping customers up at night. What’s in the news and relevant to them that they would get excited about. An interesting example here is we ran a programmatic advertising guide to a whole bunch of marketers for one of our clients and it was so interesting. We had these crazy high conversion rates with VPS and CMOS. And we wonder why in the world was that. And it turned out that people who were, let’s say, Manager, Director level, and even individual contributors, they already knew what programmatic advertising was and they were consuming it, trying to decide if it was right for them. But you had these VPS and CMOS, these high level marketers that were expected to know what programmatic advertising was, but they didn’t kno. They were looking for someone to educate them, so that when they got asked about it, they didn’t look stupid. So think about things that will solve the pain point for someone that it’s keeping them up at night. And maybe it’s in the news and relevant to them. I think this content is so well produced within a company because you guys know your own customer and you know your own product and industry very well. But one outsource approach I found I’ve got a friend who it’s a husband and wife team and she’s a journalist, and he’s a writer, and they go and interview customers, prospective customers leads that didn’t close, and they go and find interesting subjects and pain points. And then they write it up in this pretty package of, you know, here’s the content from the research. And it just goes to show that when you actually solve the problem, people will beat down your door to get it because that content always performs super super well. 27:24 So the gist here is you go and solve a real problem for them or satisfy a real curiosity. And you really can do no wrong. You could do things like have a misspelling in your ad, or insult their intelligence or have a crappy landing page, and you’ll still see 15% or higher conversion rates, you’ll get endless scale with your audience, and you’ll have super low cost access to your ideal target audience. It will be brilliant and it will feel like magic and the only difference is the piece of content. A good example of this is we had a client who was offering five different content assets and we went through and did super hyper testing on all of these assets, we could not get our cost per conversion under like $129. And we’ve been working with this client for four months, and I was absolutely certain they were going to fire us because there’s just no way that downloading a guide or a white paper is worth $129. Then one day they came out with a new piece of content. It was titled The Definitive Guide to Onboarding and it was an HR offer to companies HR, who were constantly onboarding new employees and trying to give them a better experience. And overnight, that piece of content totally changed our entire initiative, the entire program. Click through rates tripled, and conversion rates doubled. We ended up with cost per conversion under $29, which was a total change and allowed us to scale way up. So that was a great example to me of same audience. We’re using the same tactic to get in front of them, but the content made 100% of the difference. We’ve got a client called Xant.ai. That’s the letter Xant.ai. And they have a product that connects salespeople to the buyers better. They have a dialer solution so they’ve done tons and tons of outbound sales and they have all the data around it. And we put out this offer that was like, “Here’s the best time of day to contact people”. “Here’s the best cadence to follow up”. “Here’s the best number of times to do each kind of outreach to result in the best success”. And this converted super super well. We also had a client who was partnering with Google to do a breakfast at Google’s headquarters for marketers. And the landing page wasn’t special, the targeting wasn’t special, the ad copy wasn’t special. The offer was. Marketers were so excited to go and have breakfast at Google and learn about these things. So it had a 55% conversion rate, which was Incredible. We did exactly the same thing with Microsoft and Bing, a couple months later, and it didn’t have nearly the same conversion rate. So remember, these things are very special, and they are in the offer itself. So turn all of your guns towards creating the right content that people will kill for. And you will see the results in your LinkedIn Ads. There are some people who are doing really cool things in the space for increasing your conversion rates. There’s a company called Hushly, I think it’s Hushly, who will take all of the traffic on your website who are looking at a piece of content. And using exit intent, they will pop something up and try to get that user to then re-engage and give you their information. So these are only the people who are going to leave anyway and then they charge you on a per lead basis of the people who they got to convert that wouldn’t have converted already. Really cool solution. Really not expensive. And then I mentioned listables.com earlier. That was like a dynamic checklist that someone would not only want to give their information to download, but they’ll want to keep it around so they can always check back with it and check things off. I’ve got a friend named Chris Dayley, D-A-Y-L-E-Y, who runs Smart-CRO.com. And he’s a conversion optimization consultant. And he helps companies who have a lot of traffic, do a lot of AB testing to figure out what people will convert on better and what they won’t. And so those are three of the cool things or people I’ve seen who are working wonders in this space to try to increase conversion rates on top of whatever offer it is you’re looking for. Okay, I’ve got some cool episode resources coming right up, so stick around. 31:58 Okay, as promised, here are the resources that we talked about this week, there is the link to conversation ads release that LinkedIn just came out with a week of recording. So definitely check that link out in the show notes. There’s also a link to the content friction funnel that we talked about. This is a slide that I regularly use when I do public speaking and teaching and training about LinkedIn ads. So check that one out. It’s just a link to a JPEG of my slide, where you can visualize and see what types of content work at different areas of friction in the funnel. Then we also talked about listables.com, they’re the interactive checklists that you can subscribe to get for your company or your clients. There’s hushly.com, the company who takes with exit intent and charges you by the lead only for those that you would have lost anyway. And there’s Chris Daley from smart CRO, who’s a consultant that anyone who wants to check out and hire someone to help them do AB testing better, learn about their audience. He’s a great resource that I know I use quite regularly. You’ll also see the link to the LinkedIn Ads Course on LinkedIn Learning that I did. This is a great one if you’re just getting into LinkedIn Ads. It’s a very cheap course, that goes into a lot of depth. Like I’ve said in previous episodes, it covers usually about the first hour and a half of my training that I’ll give one on one, and I charge $500 an hour for that, you can get the course for 25 bucks, not a bad deal. Also on whatever podcast player you are listening, please do subscribe. I would love it if you could have all of our future episodes just fed right to you so you don’t miss a beat. And then of course, if you like what you hear, please do rate and review on whatever podcast player you are listening on. It makes a huge, huge difference to podcasters and I would give you a personal high five anytime I see you or a big digital hug if you do that for me. As always reach out to us at Podcast@B2linked.com with any ideas you have for the show, or any feedback, I’d absolutely love hear it. You know, this is Episode 10 so far, and so there’s a lot more coming out. And I’ve got a lot of ideas, but certainly love your impact as well. Okay, see you back here next week and I’m cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.