Day 1 Session 4 Advanced LinkedIn Advertising by AJ Wilcox

Unknown Speaker 0:09
Alright, so we will now segue into the presentation of one of

Unknown Speaker 0:19
our, I’m gonna call him V, the worldwide expert on LinkedIn, which is AJ Wilcox. CJ, are you ready? Or do you need a few minutes? Absolutely. How’s my audio? audios? Great. Okay, cool. All right. I’ll turn on camera here. I made anyone sweat.

Unknown Speaker 0:39
I had max back meetings. No problem.

Unknown Speaker 0:42
All right, I will do my share screen thing. Let me know. And first of all, thank you for the ultra kind intro.

Unknown Speaker 0:49
Can you see my deck up? Yes. Okay, awesome. So this is, this is about advanced LinkedIn ads. So I’m going to approach this from the perspective of like, you’ve already run some ads, maybe you’re currently running some. And so we’re going to pack some of the advanced stuff in. But if any of this is over your head, I will definitely have resources for you to go and like, get caught up on the early parts,

Unknown Speaker 1:17
the steps that come before this, but I really wanted to make sure that you guys had incredible information here, it will be super valuable to anyone who’s actually running their their account. So

Unknown Speaker 1:31
my background I started in SEO and PPC about 13 years ago,

Unknown Speaker 1:37
really just ended up falling in love with LinkedIn ads about 10 years ago. And it was a very different platform back then. But a lot of the same rules still apply of strategies that I’ve honed over the last 10 years still work today. So I’m excited to share some of that stuff with you. Important to note that a lot of what I share with you, your LinkedIn app ad reps will tell you is wrong, and they won’t like it, and they will fight you on it. So make sure you armor up. But it doesn’t change the fact that they work. And just because LinkedIn doesn’t like it, because they don’t make enough they don’t make as much money off of you, it means you’re going to be a lot more efficient.

Unknown Speaker 2:17
I would love if you just throw into the chat, I won’t be able to check until like, like later on maybe in q&a. But I’d love to hear kind of what your experience is with LinkedIn ads. And then I definitely will be around for the panel discussion afterwards. And I’d love to take questions then as well.

Unknown Speaker 2:35
So the big challenges that we have with LinkedIn ads are number one, the cost. We know that in North America, we pay an average of like eight to $12 per click, which is insane when you consider that Facebook might be two to $3 per click for b2b. And, you know, Google’s obviously kind of all over the board there. So that’s our first real big challenge. And then the others kind of follow close behind. There’s no device level bidding, like we have on every other platform. So if your landing pages suck for mobile, sorry, like, you just have to be okay with that. And there’s they don’t have native day parting or ad scheduling, like you can get on pretty much again, every other platform. So we actually went and built our own day parting scheduling tool. So if that’s interesting, I’ll have some more information here at the end as well. And then there is this metric called relevancy score that on Google, it’s called quality score on Facebook, its relevance score. On Twitter, it’s called quality adjusted bid. For some reason. Lincoln has the same kind of thing. They call it their relevancy score, but you don’t see it anywhere. The only place where you can see it is if you download a report from your, your, your platform. And even then we have no idea how old that metric is, is this something cashed from like, weeks ago, months ago? Is it an overall average, it’s a big black box that that no one can see.

Unknown Speaker 4:06
So the goal then in what I’m going to share with you the goal in managing and evergreen LinkedIn ads account is going to be either

Unknown Speaker 4:14
efficiency, or scale. That’s generally what it is. And, of course, we always wish that we can scale up significantly, while keeping efficiency where it is, or maybe even increasing. But those are really the two focuses that you should have. You should only have one at a time is when I would pause it because the costs are so high on LinkedIn. What it means is in order to mitigate your risk, you will want to do a few things. So the first is avoid LinkedIn best practices. Things like they will tell everyone you should be using audience expansion, which just muddies your audience, it lets people in that you wouldn’t normally target and with the amount that you’re paying, I would highly recommend you be ultra specific about who you’re going

Unknown Speaker 5:00
After and not leave that up to LinkedIn. Also, the default bid setting that they will drop you on is used to be called auto bidding. Now it’s it’s called, like

Unknown Speaker 5:13
automated delivery for impressions.

Unknown Speaker 5:17
It’s the most expensive way to pay about 90% of the time. So you want to avoid that you want to start by bidding by Max cost per click, and start by bidding low. Again, your reps are going to hate this, they’re going to tell you that you’re not bidding aggressively enough. But the proof will be in the pudding when your cost per lead is a fifth of what they recommend.

Unknown Speaker 5:40
And, yeah, here’s some benchmarks. This is a really good slide to just take a screenshot of, I also have a podcast episode all about benchmarks that you could go listen to if you want. But this is basically where you’re shooting from. If you’re running sponsored content, if your click through rates are anything over about point 4%, you can pat yourself on the back, you’re in the right range. If you’re paying less than about $8 per click, and you’re targeting in North America, that’s absolutely a great sign. And if you have conversion rates that are in excess of 15%, for a free content download, you’re doing great.

Unknown Speaker 6:19
If you’re pushing people to a hard offer, like talk to sales or buy something, get a demo, take a trial, if you’re anywhere between that like one and a half to 4%, you’re you’re about average there.

Unknown Speaker 6:33
This slide is I don’t have time to walk you through kind of the economic style graph here. But what it is meant to show you is that when you are below about this 1% click through rate here, I’ll switch this to a pointer. When you’re below about 1%. In a click through rate, it is cheaper to bid by cost per click. And when you are above about 1% click through rate, it is cheaper to bid by cost per impression. And the easiest way to bid by cost per impression is that auto bid. So I mentioned is the most expensive way to pay 90% of the time, but you 10% of of awesome advertisers who have ads that are getting clicked on like three times the average rate, that’s when you want to be using the the auto bidding.

Unknown Speaker 7:20
Oh, this is the strategy that I will recommend that again, I say armor up here, your reps are not going to like you for it. So when you go in to do the bidding, it looks a little bit different now. But you can see LinkedIn is going to show you a other similar advertisers are bidding between 1377 and 2315.

Unknown Speaker 7:44
Sorry, if you’re if you’re paying $13 and above for clicks, chances are you’re doing something wrong.

Unknown Speaker 7:51
But LinkedIn will tell you, you should be happy paying those astronomical numbers. I think that’s absolute garbage you I mean, unless you’ve got a teeny teeny audience of like just the fortune 500 CEOs or something, you really shouldn’t need to be in this range. So instead, what you do is you just go and put a really low number in there like like $2 $4, whatever. And then LinkedIn is going to come up and say, Oh, your bid needs to be at least. And that’ll give you a number. That’s where you know your floor bid is. So what you want to do is start with your budgets high your daily budgets just so you don’t trip them, you want to get a feel for what your audience is capable of spending, and then set your bids at the absolute floor. So in this case, the floor bid is $5. Great, set it at $5 for a couple days, and just see, if you still spend your budget, congratulations, you, you just hit the jackpot, you bid the lowest amount possible that LinkedIn will let you and you still filled your whole budget, you got all the traffic that you wanted. Um, If however, you understand your actual budget, let’s say you want to spend $50 per day but you’re only spending 20, then you will come in here and increase your bid, you know, 25 cents, 50 cents, whatever there.

Unknown Speaker 9:12
If you and I think

Unknown Speaker 9:16
here’s the saying that I really like if you hit your daily budget during the day, it means you paid too much for your clicks along the way. That can probably get simplified. But the idea is that if if you set your daily budget low enough that you’re hitting it, then it means you’re you’re bidding too high, you’re paying too much.

Unknown Speaker 9:37
Here’s the the flowchart that I go through in my mind. So if I’m getting click through rates less than about point three 5% then I know there’s something wrong with that significantly below LinkedIn benchmark, where it’s actually pretty easy to beat their benchmark. If you’re somewhere in between, let’s say like the point three five to 1% then

Unknown Speaker 10:00
You’re doing well, you’re beating the average, you know, keep going. And you might have to bid up if you want to get more traffic. And then

Unknown Speaker 10:08
if you are above 1%, that’s when you want to change your bid type to CPM. If you’re not using the auto bidding, you’ll want to bid high and bid aggressively, aggressively. But,

Unknown Speaker 10:21
but auto bidding just does that for you. It’s basically a max bid CPM kind of kind of bid.

Unknown Speaker 10:28
I mentioned that there wasn’t the ability to do some sort of scheduling our day parting. So we actually built our own tool. And the reason why if you look at this graph, and the purple line here is the inventory supply. So you get here to like the morning when people start logging in and getting into work. And you’ll see that the inventory peaks around that time. And then you get till like late afternoon, fewer people are using it. And then late at night, no one’s using well, because this is an economics curve, when and you have to assume that your your supply of advertisers is constant, because people aren’t day parting, what that means is price is going to be an inverse of this. So if you follow the price curve, when no one is online, like early, early morning, that’s when you’re, you’re going to be paying the highest amount for that traffic. Not great, right. But then when, when people start logging on in the morning, and people are ready to convert, they’re fresh for the day, that’s the best time to be showing ads. Oh, and that happens to be when it’s also the cheapest. So

Unknown Speaker 11:38
check that out, you’ll have to understand for your own target audience if they fit this mold. But, you know, check that out. And feel free to use our scheduling tool. If you schedule three or fewer campaigns every day, it’s it’s free indefinitely.

Unknown Speaker 11:55
I do want to do a quick time check because I I kind of

Unknown Speaker 12:00
how am I doing? You’re doing fun. Okay, cool. Oh, I have plenty more information here. But just like break in, cut me off anytime I start to go over because boy, okay,

Unknown Speaker 12:13
some great advanced targeting tactics that you should be using on your accounts. The first is, if you are using skill targeting, or group targeting, I would automatically recommend using job function exclusions on those campaigns. And the reason why is because a lot of people who are trying to sell to your target audience,

Unknown Speaker 12:36
they they are in sales, they’re in marketing. And they’re, of course interested in what other people are saying to their audience. So they will click on your ads, but they will not be your customer. Think of them as your competitors. So if you’re, let’s say you’re going after it or something, it skills or it groups, if you exclude the marketers and the sales folks and the biz dev that will get rid of everyone who who’s a would be competitor there and just tightens up your audience.

Unknown Speaker 13:04
Also, if you are targeting small to medium sized businesses,

Unknown Speaker 13:10
what we have on LinkedIn is this issue of

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company sizes that are known and declared and company sizes that are unknown and undeclared. And so what happens if you go in and you’re explicitly saying I want to target companies that are 50 people and below, what you’re getting are the companies who have declared that they have 50 or fewer employees. But what you’re missing is the other half of the population that is at a small company who never saw the value in creating a LinkedIn company page so that they could declare their company size. So if you want small companies, instead of explicitly saying I want one through 10, or Yeah, one through 10, and then 11, through 50. Instead, what you do is you exclude 51. and above. What that does is it leaves you with those who have explicitly said I’m less than than 50 as well as the unknowns, which are probably going to be less than 50 because they tend to be smaller companies.

Unknown Speaker 14:19
If you’ve ever been tempted to use the the age targeting, or years of experience targeting, just be aware that those are both inferred metrics. And LinkedIn is wrong a lot of the time. So it’s a lot better for you to just use seniority when you can, because seniority is a lot more accurate. And then with pretty much every audience I’ve mentioned this earlier, pretty much every campaign you create LinkedIn is going to auto check the use, enable audience expansion, and I just want to tell you like avoid it like COVID it is a this is poison for your

Unknown Speaker 15:00
ads campaigns and, and LinkedIn really thinks that you should be using it which I vehemently disagree.

Unknown Speaker 15:07
I can tell when I look at an account whether someone came into LinkedIn ads from the paid search side of things, or whether they came from like managing organic, social, and then kind of being handed the keys to spend some money.

Unknown Speaker 15:23
And the way I can find this out, if you’ve come from a paid search background, where account organization is really important to you, chances are you’ll name your campaigns in a really smart way. You’ll name them things like after the audience that you’re targeting, and the ad format you’re using, and, and the geography you’re targeting that kind of thing. Organic social folks tend to say, Oh, I’m doing this big webinar push. So I’m going to name this campaign, you know, webinar 2021, I would highly, highly recommend approach it from the paid search perspective here, name all of your campaigns and audiences after who like the things that are not going to change about that on. That’s the ad format, the language, the the ad type, and the targeting that you’re using. Don’t name it after the bid type you’re going to use because you can always change your bid type. And don’t name it after the campaign that you’re running right now, whether it’s like a webinar or an ebook. Because as you make these these temporary campaigns, the only live for a little while, you’re going to mess up your account, you’re going to dirty it by adding a whole bunch of campaigns that are throwaway and you won’t be able to use them in the future, what you want to do think of your account as being more of an evergreen example of advertising, and name your campaigns after the audiences that you’ll want to go after, and then continue to invest in those same campaigns. for a long period of time, when you’re done with this webinar, just pause the webinar ads, and then launch your new ebook ads or whatever.

Unknown Speaker 17:03
LinkedIn will regularly recommend that your audience sizes are at least 300,000 people.

Unknown Speaker 17:10
Again, I disagree wholeheartedly, I think audiences between about 20,000 to 80,000 are really my sweet spot.

Unknown Speaker 17:18
If I have an audience with more than that in there, then what I would prefer to do is break that into to find something that differentiates you bifurcates that audience so that I can have two separate campaigns. And then I can learn from the difference. So if I’m going after, like, let’s say, a

Unknown Speaker 17:40
senior, senior IT leaders, what I might do is say okay, I’m gonna put VPS in one in one campaign, and then CIOs and CTOs in another. And that way, I can see the difference of engagement between the VP level and the C suite.

Unknown Speaker 17:59
I’m going to kind of blaze through the account based marketing, because I’m fairly certain that I’m, I won’t make it through everything. And then again, Dave, feel free to just interrupt me at any time. Okay.

Unknown Speaker 18:12
So with with account based marketing, this is, you know, account based marketing where you can target specific accounts by name or specific companies. It’s all the rage right now. But LinkedIn ads has had this ability since 2008, when the very first came out. And it’s just become stronger and stronger with the advent of being able to upload a list of campaign or sorry, a list of companies. So definitely take advantage of this, if you can. Some of the ways that we use this is we will upload lists of our sales dream accounts, we can go to sales, and we get and we can ask them, what are the dream accounts that you would love to work with, and add those to a targeting. You can also do the same thing with upload a list of your competitors and add them as an exclusion. That’s pretty sweet.

Unknown Speaker 19:01
You can do the same thing with your customers, exclude your customers from your ads, so that you’re not paying for someone that you’ve already acquired.

Unknown Speaker 19:10
If you’re in SAS software, or something where you might want to target your current customers, to let them know about something new and cool that’s coming up, then that’s another thing you can do is kind of reduce churn by getting on people’s radars. And then something else we like to do target those who are already in your funnel, but have not yet closed and have an act like a funnel accelerator.

Unknown Speaker 19:38
Anyone who gets real geeky on on LinkedIn ads, make sure to subscribe to my podcast. It’s called the LinkedIn ad show. We’re about 45 episodes in and we have everything from interviews with LinkedIn, product managers to solo episodes of major sharing deep strategy. So it’s really a masterclass. Check that out.

Unknown Speaker 20:00
I mentioned that I’d have some resources for you in case this is over your head. If you’re not already advertising. If you go to our website B to linkedin.com, slash checklist you can download.

Unknown Speaker 20:14
It’s the same checklist we give to all of our new onboarding clients. And it’s the eight things that you need in order to get started. So hopefully that gives you a nice leg up if you’re just looking to get advertised. Okay, with that being said, I’m pretty sure I’ve hit my limit. No, no, no, you did fine. did great. Yeah. Great information.

Unknown Speaker 20:35
Well, presentation will present it as what as usual. In fact, the first two comments were amazing content. And AJ is awesome.

Unknown Speaker 20:46
You guys are right, you are my two favorites now.

Unknown Speaker 20:51
So um,

Unknown Speaker 20:54
two quick questions. What types of products should not be promoted in LinkedIn,

Unknown Speaker 21:00
I think anything with a low lifetime value is,

Unknown Speaker 21:05
is a candidate for being kind of nixed by LinkedIn, just because the costs are so high, it means that they have priced themselves out of the market or for certain types of categories. So if you’re in lifetime values of, let’s say, you know, $5,000, less, maybe even up to 10,000, it’s a possibility that LinkedIn is going to be too expensive for you.

Unknown Speaker 21:30
We’ve also found that we’ve tried a whole bunch of times with some form of e commerce, and we haven’t found e commerce to cold audiences to be a fit at all. So those are probably my, my two big ones. Gotcha.

Unknown Speaker 21:46
Okay, next question.

Unknown Speaker 21:48
The benchmark numbers that you talked about, is the click through rate for engagement or website clicks? Ooh, good question. This is actually any sort of any sort of click on the ad. So if you’re running an engagement objective, that would be any sort of click on the ad like, like, comment, share, follow company. But if you’re running one, that’s that’s website, traffic or website conversion, this would be a click on the ad that would result in a trip to the landing page. So I would say, if you are driving traffic, or if you’re using lead forms, consider these click through not engagement. Because naturally, if you’re running an engagement, ad, you will see more people clicking, but they’re not necessarily the actions that you’d help one. Right. Gotcha.

Unknown Speaker 22:46
Okay, this is a tough one. Typically, how long should an ad run before making edits? Whoo, I like it. Okay. So if your goal is testing, and you want to do a B testing through and figure out what’s working and what’s not, you may want to switch up after

Unknown Speaker 23:07
if my first three days of running an ad are bad, I can tell that this is not working, then I’ll switch something out and try again.

Unknown Speaker 23:16
But if I’m running something that is working really well, I don’t want to disrupt that. Because we know with social, everything has a time to live on it, like a finite life. And so if I switch something up that was working, chances are I’m going to switch to something that wasn’t working as well. So I do want to run that for as long as I can, before it stops performing well. And on average, that’s about every 27 to 33 days when it’s due for a refresh. Gotcha. Okay, good.

Unknown Speaker 23:49
Okay, um, for higher ed, graduate programs,

Unknown Speaker 23:53
CPC and CPA on very high, narrowing down more granularity doesn’t help. Group targeting doesn’t work. How do we make it broad and relevant?

Unknown Speaker 24:06
Our hands are kind of tied or for graduate level stuff.

Unknown Speaker 24:12
The targeting you have available to you is things like, what did they get their degree in? And do they not have a more advanced degree, a Master’s or a PhD yet, and you know, what they studied, where they went to school. So if you’re using all of those, your your hands are kind of tied that that’s the limit really, of the educational information that LinkedIn knows about them. So I would say, try to try to do whatever you can to get click through rates up on your ads. If you can find something to offer that that other schools have not been offering, then your costs will drop, and you’ll get a ton more traffic. So that’s really the key, find something interesting and valuable to present to them and get cost down that way.

Unknown Speaker 25:00
Right.

Unknown Speaker 25:03
You talked about ABM. Um,

Unknown Speaker 25:08
how do you deal with the fact that some of the audience sizes end up being so miniscule?

Unknown Speaker 25:15
Yeah, we see this a lot. If you’re targeting small companies, let’s say you’re targeting VPS and above, have a whole bunch of small companies, you may end up with just a teeny audience. And, yeah, that makes sense. Like, you’ve got 100 companies, and there’s an average of about three people at each company who fit that description, you’ll end up with about 300 people.

Unknown Speaker 25:40
So generally, what we try to do is just collect a larger list. And sometimes that’s not possible. So instead, what you might want to do is enlarge the number of people in the organization that you’re going to match. So let’s say you really care about executives. But it’s not large enough to to go after, consider adding directors and maybe even managers into the audience to get it larger.

Unknown Speaker 26:04
It’s the problem that we always faced with with social because social click through rates are so small, it’s basically like display advertising. And because of that, you need a pretty large audience to really spend meaningful amounts of money. So try to expand your audience in whatever way makes the most sense. Great.

Unknown Speaker 26:24
Okay, last question. Before we go to the General q&a,

Unknown Speaker 26:29
how reliable his LinkedIn and making decisions between ads,

Unknown Speaker 26:36
I see that when I upload two to three variants secretly decides which one gets more impressions.

Unknown Speaker 26:42
Yeah, this is a really good question.

Unknown Speaker 26:46
My recommendation is to always run to creative at a time, because and this is I found the same thing to be true with all the other ad platforms as well. But if I launch, let’s say, four pieces of creative, immediately, LinkedIn is going to choose one favorite and give it the majority of the impressions, one is going to do, okay, and then 345, whatever are all going to get, like, between one to 10 impressions, and, and a sec, effectively, if LinkedIn doesn’t choose that one of those ads right off the bat, it has the red letter, like it has the mark of death on it, you’ll never be able to bid high enough to get LinkedIn to start showing those ads. So I say why even bother, why even why even take the time to create these additional ad variations when you know, some of them won’t get enough data to even tell what’s working. So we run two at a time and and they’re always to fresh new variants. So if we have a winner, we pause the winner and then launch an exact copy of the winner along with our next AV test. And that way we can be certain especially over multiple campaigns that the actual overall winner is the the winner and it wasn’t just LinkedIn making an early call. Gotcha.

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