LinkedIn Ads Show

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 Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses  Youtube Channel Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript Ad rotation settings on LinkedIn Ads. Should you rotate your ads evenly to get better data for your AB tests or leave on optimized for performance? It's a trick question. And we'll cover exactly why on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! As most modern ad platforms do, LinkedIn has an ad rotation setting that at first glance appears very intelligent to use, but it's not. And we're going to talk today about why. I'll even share with you why I call this the "charge me more and show me less button". In ad rotation, there are two different options. There's the default called optimized for performance. And then there's one called rotate ads evenly. I want to love rotate evenly because we're always testing. But it is rarely the best option to use and we'll cover why. First off in the news, Shae on our team brought to my attention a new rollout called comparison metrics. And I've noticed this in many of my accounts, since what it is, is when you choose your time range, you can choose the comparison range as well. So if you're looking at the last week, it'll automatically show you the changes from the previous week, along with percent changes next to each metric. So in the screenshot that Shae took for us, I can see that spend was up 37%, and visits were up 23.9% and costs were up 18%. So in this screenshot that Shae gave us, I can see that in the past seven days for this client, our spend is down 37% visits are only down 23%, which shows cost savings. Cost per click was down 18% and number of impressions were only down 11 and a half percent. It's hardly what I would call a game changer, but this kind of data can be really helpful just for understanding what's my performance doing over time. And being able to see that right within the platform. I applaud LinkedIn for coming out with changes like this. I wanted to highlight a couple reviews. We have DenisefromCumbria, and Denise I'm sorry, I can't figure out who you are on LinkedIn, just searching for Denise and Cumbria. But she said, "At last LinkedIn ads takes the floor. AJ is an expert in the space and then sharing some detailed information here. Episode One is packed with detail". Denise, thank you so much. I sincerely try to pack every episode with detail. So I do hope you're still a listener, we'd love to give you a shout out there. And if I can find out who you are, I'll shout you out by your full name and title and all that. Then we have username CGProverb, CG says, "A fantastic source of information five stars. I recently found this podcast when AJ was interviewed on another marketing podcast I follow. I have to say, after only listening to a few episodes, the content is invaluable. I am hooked. Thanks, AJ, for sharing this with us." CG, I'm so glad to have you hooked. Thanks for listening. Same goes to you. If you want to reach out to me and let me know who you are, I'd love to shout you out full name and title and company on all that. Okay, back to the topic at hand. Let's hit it. So we get asked a lot about the rotate ads evenly option versus the optimized for performance option. And I first started playing with this feature back in 2011. And like I mentioned in the intro, I really wanted to love it because I'm always running an AB test. So of course, I would want both of my ads, or maybe even all four of my ads to be shown evenly. So I can tell which one is getting a better click through rate. As we know with the way that LinkedIn ads works, when you launch, let's say two ads in a campaign, one is probably going to get a significant amount of impressions more than the other. So I wanted to even that out. So I started testing this and I actually started out testing it at a large scale. And I'm really glad that I was spending hundreds of 1000s on this test, because it allowed me to see the impact very quickly. And now I'm sharing this impact with you. Every single time I turned on this option, I noticed the same thing happened, impressions would drop. And this is significant. And my effective cost per click, no matter how I was bidding, would increase significantly. At the time, I had to go to my LinkedIn reps and ask what is going on here? Why would this be happening? But then LinkedIn and later years have come out and actually changed the definition of what this option is. So if you open up campaign manager, you have to actually go into editing one of your campaigns, and then get to the ad step. And right at the top of the page as you're seeing your ads. It'll say ads in this campaign, and there's a little cog, a little wheel. And as you click it, you'll see the two different ad rotation options. The definition for optimized for performance, it says recommended and I also recommend this, it says this option delivers impressions to the creatives evenly at first to learn which creative performs best, then more impressions will be delivered to the creatives with the best performance. Then when you read the definition for rotate ads evenly, it says, this has a nice clue in it, "this option enters each creative into the auction evenly", I added a little bit of emphasis here, "giving the ad a fair opportunity to compete for an impression without taking performance into account". So if you read into this enough, you'll understand why this is actually deleterious for your performance. What's happening is it's not showing each ad evenly to your audience, what it's doing is it's entering each ad evenly into the auction. But the auction is very strict. With the auction, better performance wins. And worse, performance gets hammered. What's actually happening here, let's say you have one ad that has a relevancy score of seven, and another one that has a relevancy score of five, both ads are getting entered into the auction evenly. That's exactly what it says it's going to do. But the ad with a relevancy score of seven is going to win more auctions every time it's put into the auction. And it's going to win it at a better rate. So maybe your effective cost per click from this ad is going to be $10. But what about the ad with a relevancy score of four, it's entered into the auction just as often as the other ad. But because it only has a relevancy score of four, it's going to lose most of the auctions it's put in there against. But when it does when you're going to pay a significant premium, because the ad has a poor relevancy score. So when you run these auctions, one after another over and over, you start to see that you've lost a lot of impressions, because you were entering a loser into the auction just as often. And the times when those ads do win the auction, your prices went up, and you had to pay significantly more for them. So this is why I call this option the charge me more and show me less. This is not great dynamics. And because of this, I don't recommend this option for most advertisers. There are limited cases where we do recommend though, and we'll get into those right here after the break. 7:10 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. Managing LinkedIn ads is a massive time and money investment. Do you want to return on that investment? Consider booking a discovery call with B2Linked, the original LinkedIn Ads performance agency. We've worked with some of the largest LinkedIn accounts over the past 12 years. And our unique scientific approach to ads management, combined with our proprietary tools allow us to confidently optimize and scale your LinkedIn Ads faster and more efficiently than any other agency in house team or digital ads hire could. Plus, we're official LinkedIn partners. Just go to B2Linked.com/apply, we'd absolutely love the chance to get to work together. Alright, let's jump back into the cases where we might actually recommend even ad rotation. And I know a lot of times what we tell you is don't listen to LinkedIn recommendations, because they're not always in your favor. But in this case, LinkedIn is actually really clued in. You'll notice that optimized for performance is the default ad rotation setting on most ad formats. And it used to be actually for all ad formats. The one that I would pick out was sponsored messaging ad formats. So that was message ads and conversation ads. The only way to bid for those was percent, which if you put this into the same parlance as the rest of the advertising that we do, you can only pay per single impression that you were sending. So if you had two different message ads going head to head, the only way for LinkedIn to know what a click or an engagement was, which one of these was performing better was with opens. But an open is not a very true form of engagement here. It doesn't tell you which ad was performing better. That comes to the click the actual click. But clicks on sponsored messaging, oftentimes will happen three, six days later, after the ad has already been sent to them. And that's not enough notice for the auction to take it into account. So we would notice that when we ran sponsored messaging campaigns with optimized for performance, one of the ads would get shown a disproportionate amount of time, and the other just had next to no impressions. We used to do this manually where we would go switch all of our sponsored messaging campaigns over into rotate ads evenly. And this allowed us to do more of what we actually wanted to do, which is AB testing our two creatives. And this has been to three years now, but LinkedIn caught on and realized that this is the experience that advertisers should be having with sponsored messaging. So now when you open a sponsored messaging campaign, your ad rotation settings are going to be set to even. But all the other ad formats as far as I know, they're all by default set to optimize for performance, which is exactly the right way to go in my opinion. I think defaults should be set for the majority of advertisers. This is one case where LinkedIn got the defaults totally right. This is an advertisers best interests. We also had a situation recently where one of our clients, they're not going specifically for high click through rates, because this is very much a long play for them. They're just doing brand awareness at this point. And what we noticed with this client is pretty much every ad that we launch has about average click through rate, but we have a lot of different creatives that we want to test and we want to learn about. So what we ended up doing was turning on even ad rotation here. And it's actually turned out really well for us, but that is only because the ads had similar click through rates to begin with. If one of your ads has a lower click through rate, inevitably, you're going to start getting punished with lower impressions and higher cost per click. So far, those are the only two cases where we actually recommend even ad rotation. But if any of you have any other great use cases you found, I'd love to hear about it. Reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. Okay, so that leaves a giant hole for us on LinkedIn Ads, because we still want to do this AB testing. But if we tried to use the ad rotation setting that was built for AB testing, but it ends up being bad for us, then what's an advertiser to do? Well, LinkedIn heard us loud and clear. This is a tool that has been coming for a long time. And we actually posted about it a couple of weeks ago. If you go to the left hand navigation inside of campaign manager to test, you'll notice you can now create an AB test. And we've talked about this in a past episode. But we also did a whole post about it, you'll find this post down in the show notes if you want to check it out. And LinkedIn actually reached out to us about that post to let us know what was coming in the future. Because currently, we don't find this feature very helpful. The main reason why is when you create a new test, whether you set up a campaign versus campaign, or an audience versus audience, or an ad versus ad, it creates two brand new campaigns, each one with a single ad in. And I do not think that this is the best environment for an AB test to have. These are two campaigns competing against each other from the very beginning with no history. So honestly, we haven't even used this feature, I just don't even find it useful. But LinkedIn did reach out to us on it and let us know. And I'm going to share a quote here. They said, "The good news is that customers can use the winning AB test campaign as an evergreen campaign following the conclusion of the test. Additionally, allowing for existing campaigns in new AB tests is in our roadmap. So more to come." So backing up a little bit, one of the biggest reasons why we don't like having new campaigns created every time we launch a new test is those campaigns are now just littering the account. We're going to now have several if not 10s, 20s, 50s, of campaigns that are absolute garbage, that we then just have to mark as archived and try to ignore them inside the platform. The AB testing feature that would be useful to me is AB testing ad creatives in a single campaign. And then that way, it's not littering up the account. And as we move forward, the winner gets to stay in the campaign and the loser, we can just turn off. And it sounds like from this response. That's going to be the functionality in the future. But right now, we're stuck with having to create new campaigns. If this topic is really interesting to you, you may want to go back and listen to episode 36. That was all about AB testing on the ads platform. And we do cover it pretty intensely there. But I do want to share with you now the basics of how I approach AB tests on the platform. First, I'm always going to start by leaving ad rotation on optimized for performance. Like I mentioned, except for when we're using sponsored messaging ad formats, I'm also going to run multiple campaigns targeting the same audience at the same time. An example of how I might do that might be one campaign is targeting the same ICP by their job title, but another one might be targeting them by job function with seniority. So same ICP, but different campaigns and ways of reaching them, then I'm going to launch the same AB test in both of those campaigns. And it's a little bit more complex than I'm making it sound because we're probably going to have more than two campaigns targeting the same ICP. And the more you have, the better this data is going to be. But let's say in one campaign, ad A wins and gets better reach at lower cost. But in the next campaign, LinkedIn actually decided that ad B one and ad B got more impressions at a lower cost. You might be wondering, okay, which of these ads is actually the winner. So that's why you might want 3, 4, 5 campaigns targeting your ICP, which is one of the reasons why you would hire us to do this, rather than trying to do it yourself. But I realized that's not in the cards for everyone. Hence why I'm sharing with you our approach here. But when you run this test over time, you'll notice that the platform in general will start to prefer one of your ads, either ad A or ad B. And now you know, regardless of whether LinkedIn made the right call in each of those campaigns, as to which ad won or not, you get the overall data telling you that yes, ad A is the winner here. And you should go all in on an A. Or, you do have the data telling you that hey, in one of these targeting types, or to one of these sonorities ad B is actually a better ad creative. And so you can leave ad B running in those and leave ad A running in the ones where it won. You've got lots of options here. But the principle stands. If you run an AB test in just one campaign, LinkedIn may choose the wrong ad to give the better relevancy score to and over time, it'll shake out it'll get better, but I usually want better ad data right from the very beginning. All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around. 16:20 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. Like we mentioned in this episode, the post that's describing how the AB testing tool inside of campaign manager works, you can go and read that post. It's a great one. There's also episode 36. That's all about AB testing. So we've linked to that as well. Now, if you or anyone you know, is looking to learn more about LinkedIn Ads and managing them, check out the course that I did on LinkedIn Learning all about LinkedIn Ads. It is by far the highest quality and the lowest cost course out there. If this is your first time listening, welcome, we're excited to have you here. And I invite you to subscribe. If this is not your first time listening, please go and rate and review the podcast on whatever player you use. Most are doing this on Apple podcasts. I've heard several mention that they've done it on Spotify. I just don't get to see the reviews on Spotify. But I'm imagining at some point they're going to roll it out and I'll be able to see them and I can start shouting you out for them. With any questions, suggestions, or corrections, please do reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. I'm cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Click to Message Ads early sneak peek Vidmob Study by Cooper Nefsky Follow AJ on LinkedIn Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses  Youtube Channel Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript Are you prepared for the LinkedIn Adspocalypse come down into my prepper shelter. And let's talk about the end times. I promise I have enough mashed potatoes and root beer to get us through the turbulence on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics, my apologies for skipping a week of recording recently. I went on a much needed vacation with my wife over spring break. We ended up going on a cruise down to Honduras and Mexico. And it was absolutely amazing. But now I need to work on losing those four pounds that suddenly appeared out of nowhere. Pesky pounds. Like I shared in the teaser, we're talking today about changes to the platform that may come. And I'm super geeking out in this episode, so I'll leave it at that for now. Let's jump into the news for this week. First off Vidmob, who has an official LinkedIn partner, they released a study recently all about how people are interacting with video ads. And it's a really solid study, lots of good data. I couldn't even begin to plan a test like what they've done. They analyzed all different types of things that video ads might include. They might be length, or color contrast, or whether a logo was present, or who the subject of the video was all of this stuff that is very subjective with video, but they have incredible data for it. I've linked you to an article on LinkedIn by Cooper Nefsky, who's head of partnerships at Vidmob. And he wrote it up really well. Here were some of the quick points that I pulled out. For all objectives. videos that are shorter than 30 seconds tended to have the best engagement. So that's a great reminder, we should keep video ads short. Make sure your logo is burned into the video. There is quite a bit of advice out there saying like don't dwell on your logo and don't try to make it a big branding piece. But honestly, I totally agree with what they said, because they noticed an average 17% lift in click through rate when the brand logo was present during the first few seconds opening. Another great tip here was to make sure you include a human storyline when possible. They said especially in the consideration phases of advertising in those objectives, that human storylines tended to play much better. This one's not a big surprise. But I'm really glad to see the data around it. Brighter colors and high contrast works really well in the awareness objectives. And this makes perfect sense, because it makes it a thumb stopper. This is what we've always recommended with static ads in having bright and high contrast and colors to what else is on LinkedIn. So this was really cool to see. I was also really impressed, they had three different reports. One that was industry agnostic, they had one specifically for financial services, and another one where all of their examples are tech. So I highly recommend go check out those reports. I was really impressed. I also got an email recently. And the subject line was credit available for paused LinkedIn ads that were launched in error. As I read into it, LinkedIn realized that there was a glitch that happened back in December of 2022, where some paused creatives went through a review and actually went live despite being paused. So this may or may not apply to you, it actually only applied to like four of the accounts that we manage. And I don't know how big that credit is that we're going to get. But I do just want to take this chance to commend LinkedIn for going back after the fact and letting us know when they've caught an error and refunding us. This is something I haven't seen on any other platform, at least doing it this actively. And I have high praise for LinkedIn to reach out with these types of things. I had two reviews I want to highlight this week, a user by the name of India9076 Sorry, if your name is India, I don't know how to figure out who you are. So I can't thank you by name. But they said, "Great podcast. I've learned a lot from listening to this podcast, great for those who are looking to scale up their LinkedIn activity." India, thanks so much for leaving that. We also have a review left by BillyGubby. He's the Pps Director at pink sheep out of the UK. He left a review that says, "Great as always consistently great, useful info from AJ." Billy, I really appreciate you saying that we work hard on consistency. So with that being said, I want to feature you. So if you're listening and you have not left us a review yet, please do go leave us a review. And I want to give you a shout out live here. Okay, on to the topic at hand. Let's hit it. Back during episode 92, in the news section, we talked about a glitch that had happened. Many advertisers noticed that several features had disappeared. And it only took a few hours for LinkedIn to realize and start responding to the community letting them know that this was just a glitch and everything actually did return to normal within a few hours. But it did get us thinking what is the future of LinkedIn Ads? How wouldn't be respond, what would we do if any of the features that we know and love and use were taken away from us? Of course, we know that change is absolutely inevitable on every ads platform, and LinkedIn is no exception. Just ask SEOs who lost referring keywords from Google Analytics back years ago. Or ask the Google Ads folks who all of a sudden had no control over Google starting to show their ads for close keyword variants that they weren't even targeting, regardless of match type. Maybe ask those Facebook ads, folks who are upset that every 10 minutes, the platform's UI totally changes, it makes it more complex to navigate and find where things are. Or when Facebook shuts down accounts left and right, and you have no recourse or human review process when your business is hurting. I've probably beaten this dead horse way too much here. But there's so many examples of this happening with digital marketing platforms. So if things do go away, how can you be prepared for it? I think when you actually understand and know a platform, inside and out, everything becomes a lever. I talk a lot in broad terms on this show. I'll talk about how certain ad formats don't work, or certain bid strategies aren't effective? Well, the truth is, there's probably some case maybe except for audience expansion, where every option could be used to your advantage. So what I want you to get out of this is not only concrete things that you could do to prepare for platform changes. But I also want you to think deeply and critically about how the platform works, I want you to understand it and learn it inside and out. So that you can roll with the punches when and if something changes. Also is one word of warning, don't be too reliant on any one thing in the ad platform. That means don't be married to one ad format, or an objective, or a certain targeting type. We actually had a client, they started out by using several different ad formats, and they found sponsored messaging to work really, really well. And they're based in Europe. Well, then, as many of you know, in Europe, GDPR killed the sponsored messaging ad formats. And once message ads went away, we ended up losing the client, because they were too reliant on that one thing. And we definitely learned from that experience, we should have helped them to make sure that they were running a wider variety of ad formats and hedging their bets there. But we're always sad to lose a client. So we want to help you understand the ads platform at that deep level. I want to help you think critically about how LinkedIn Ads works, and what you can do to work around these things. When this glitch happened, it also made us wonder, could this have been actually an accidental early rollout instead of just a simple glitch. So if these things actually do roll out in the future, and we lose features, let's talk about what you would actually do if some of these things were removed. Alright, here's a quick sponsor break. And then we'll dive into what to do if any of these glitches actually do get rolled out. The LinkedIn Ads show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. Managing LinkedIn Ads is a massive time and money investment. Want some of that back in terms of a return? Consider booking a discovery call with B2Linked, the original LinkedIn Ads performance agency. We've worked with some of the largest accounts over the past 12 years. And our unique scientific approach to ADS management, combined with our proprietary tools allow us to confidently optimize and scale your LinkedIn ads faster and more efficiently than any other agency in house team or digital ads hire. Plus or official LinkedIn partners. To book a call, just go to B2Linked.com/apply and we'd absolutely love the chance to get to work together. Alright, let's jump into how you can react if any of these glitches do become permanent. So first off, one of the things we noticed is that text ads as an ad format were removed. For each of these features being removed, I'm gonna go through the same framework listing, why would this be bad if it happened? Why it could possibly be good. The things you could do instead. And then finally, the likelihood of this actually being rolled out permanently. Alright, first off with text ads being removed. Why would this be bad? Well, I think removing text ads would be terrible. We love them as branding reinforcement on our other ad formats. They get so many free and cheap impressions. And they're especially good for those on very small budgets. But let's flip the tables here. Why could this actually be good for LinkedIn or even for us? I could definitely see LinkedIn doing this because text ads take up valuable real estate on desktop for users. And because they're very inexpensive clicks, LinkedIn probably doesn't make very much money on them. We've also noticed that outside of North America, text ads rarely actually make sense because LinkedIn still enforces the same him to dollar floor bid on them as when they launched back in 2008. So in other areas of the world, people are getting clicks for less than $1 from sponsored content. So text ad clicks are actually more expensive. Alright, so let's say that we actually do lose text ads in the future. What could you do instead? Well, dynamic ads are about three times the cost, but they do take up three times the real estate, and get three times the click through rate. So you might be able to argue that it could be worthwhile to use it. And they are often a couple bucks less expensive per click than sponsored content clicks. So a spotlight ad might be worth testing into. Alright, so how likely is this actually going to happen, I would actually give this about a 60% chance of happening eventually. And one clue I've got, we actually did see something with text ads change here a couple years ago. LinkedIn used to promote the top text ad in the three pack to the very top of the page as a text link. And LinkedIn internally used to call this ad slot, the one by one, it was visually out of place, and it made no sense. And then they killed it. I didn't especially have much of an opinion on removing that. But one of our clients got so much performance from that inventory, that once it was taken away, they were forced to abandon it. And it really shook up their results and their whole approach to the platform. Okay, the next thing that advertisers were reporting back during that glitch, they noticed that inside of the website visits objective, you could no longer bid by max delivery. Alright, so why would this be bad? Well, anytime someone takes bidding options away from us, it's always bad. Bidding options are one of the best controls and levers that we have to optimize costs on the platform. But let's think about this. Why could it be good if this happened? Well, I can kind of see LinkedIn logic here. If you're trying to get people to click on your ads to go to your site, maybe in LinkedIn's mind paying by the click makes more sense than paying by the impression. It's a bit of a stretch, but maybe I could make a case for it if I were there internally. Alright, so say this happens, what could you do instead? Well, since paying by the click is the cheapest way to pay on LinkedIn 90% of the time, I may not miss this particular feature. But we know that paying by the impression is actually more economical when you have really high click through rates. So if I were running ads that did get really high click through rates, I would probably try launching the same ads to the same targeting but in a different objective that would allow me to use maximum delivery. I'd probably start with engagement, I might consider the conversion objective as well. Alright, so likelihood of actually happening, I would give this one probably a 1% chance of happening. I really think that this is sincerely a glitch, it wouldn't make that much sense to me. But here's the next glitch, we noticed that spotlight ads were gone. We could no longer create a spotlight ad. So why would this be bad? Well, this is bad for anyone who is having success with spotlight ads. Losing any ad format is rough for those who are currently having success with it. But I'm sure there are some people who really rely on and really like spotlight ads. Alright, so why might this be good for us? Well, dynamic ads in general really aren't my favorite ad format. The only bright spot for me is follower ads. It's by far the best ad format for getting more followers to accompany page. So LinkedIn, removing spotlight ads wouldn't be the worst thing in the world for me. But if you take away follower ads, then I started to have a little bit bigger of an issue with it. Alright, so if spotlight ads go away and you wanted to use them, what could you do instead? Well, I think single image sponsored content ads are great. And in my experience, they tend to be about $2 to $3 per click more expensive than spotlight ads. But now since we don't have a bid floor, you could try running a similar ad to what you were running in your spotlight ad and just run it as single image sponsored content. And now just bid manually lower, so that you're paying in the range of what you're paying for spotlight ads. What about likelihood of actually happening here? This one could actually happen if LinkedIn decided, say, for instance, not enough people were using it to justify the maintenance. Since I don't know how many people are actually using these, I'd probably give it maybe a 20% chance of actually happening. Then we noticed the glitch that message ads were gone. The reason why this glitch caught my attention is because LinkedIn had already let us know that they were going to be sunsetting or getting rid of message ads. So when this ad format disappeared, I started to get concerned because if a bunch of weird things happen, I can just assume that it's a weird glitch. But because a bunch of weird things happen and the ad format that we were expecting to go away actually went away. That made me question if it's possible that this was actually an accidental early rollout, rather than just a simple glitch. So we know that message ads are actually going away. And by the time you listen into it, they may actually be gone. So this might be a little bit of a moot point to cover this. But why would it be bad to lose this ad format? Well, again, losing any ad format is sad for those who found success with it. It's such a unique ad format and you can't do this kind of functionality on any other platform, being able to pay to message someone. But why could this be good that it's going away? Well, it's an ad format that's always been LinkedIn's most expensive traffic. And I haven't found many scenarios where they work very well. Outside of very VIP offers and warm audiences. The price has always been a huge turnoff for me. So honestly, good riddance. But for this one, what will we be able to use instead? Thankfully, we're about to get much better options to replace message ads. We actually published an article last week on click to message ads that are going to be rolled out soon. More on that in a future episode, but check out the article about it in the show notes below if you want to get some early insight. So now the likelihood of this actually happening? Yeah, this is 100%. We're definitely gonna lose message ads. So I do have some advice for you some best practices to help you stay ahead of the game, just in case platform changes could derail your performance. Three pieces of advice here, number one, don't be a one trick pony. Test different objectives, different ad formats, different messaging, different bidding methods, be willing to test everything. And then that way, you'll have some backup things in place, just in case something fails or disappears or changes. Advice point number two, don't get comfortable on the platform. Realize that there's going to be changes and they will be disruptive at some point. So just start to expect the unexpected. Advice point number three, make hay while the sun shines. And that means if you have something that's working well, keep using it, enjoy it, appreciate it. I had a glitch early on where I could target audiences down to an audience size of one. And that was back when the platform only allowed targeting of 1000 plus. I knew it was a glitch. I knew it would be caught and patched at some point. So I prioritized tests and I had fun with it. And boy, you really missed the things that you had once they're gone. All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. Alright, we talked about the click to message ads early sneak peek. So check that out in the show notes. You'll see there's a link to the article that we wrote there. There's also a link to the Vidmob study that was done by Cooper Nefsky. Great article, great study, definitely check that out. If you or anyone you know, is looking to learn more about LinkedIn Ads, I highly recommend the LinkedIn Learning course that I did with LinkedIn on LinkedIn Ads. That's a mouthful. But it is by far the highest quality course at the lowest cost for LinkedIn Ads, check it out. And there is a nice quick link there in the show notes below on that one. If this is your first episode, you've listened to welcome, thanks for coming, and make sure to hit that subscribe button. But if this isn't your first time listening, if you've gotten any value out of the podcast, please do let us know in the form of a rating and review. We've had lots of people leaving on Apple podcasts, but also Spotify. It really is the best way that you can say thank you for us putting this content out. All right with any questions, suggestions, or corrections, reach out to us at podcast at B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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