LinkedIn Ads Show

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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