LinkedIn Ads Show

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

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'r

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

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

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

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

Show Resources

Here were the resources we covered in the episode:

Dashboard

Lashay's Visual Framework

Lashay on LinkedIn

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 a

Show Resources

Here were the resources we covered in the episode:

Demographics & Analytics Episode

Bidding Episode

Relevancy Score Episode

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 audienc

Show Resources

Here were the resources we covered in the episode:

Top Rank Marketing's Site

Lee Odden's LinkedIn

Lee Odden's Instagram

Youtube Channel

Contact us at [email protected] 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

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 [email protected] 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 [email protected] 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

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 [email protected] 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
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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 noti

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

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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

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 [email protected] 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 aw