LinkedIn Ads Show

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 Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses  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 Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses  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 Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses  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

The podcast discusses the AMO framework for evaluating LinkedIn ad strategies. They share a funny story about a LinkedIn post acronym. B2Linked helps B2B companies with targeted messaging in ads. They explore measuring video ad effectiveness 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 Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses  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 Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses  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 Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses  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 Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses  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 Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses  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 Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses  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.