Apr 14, 2020
Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show.
Show resources:
LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course
Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.
Transcript:
LinkedIn targeting is the reason we're willing to pay LinkedIn premium prices. Oh, you know we're about to get geeky today.
Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.
0:21
Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! Today we're taking a deep dive
into the targeting facets on LinkedIn. And I'm about to brain dump
on you. If you were one of the ones who loved episode three because
of how geeky we got into the history of LinkedIn Ads. I think
you're gonna like this one just as much. I'm going to cover each
available type of targeting that LinkedIn has to offer. Yes, all
24, and we'll discuss #1) how accurate the targeting is, #2) how
it's useful, and then #3) any gotchas or nuances that you should
know about or care about as you're using it. We'll also talk about
how it's derived. And we'll also target the targeting facets in
order presented in campaign manager so you can follow right along.
Alright, let's hit it.
1:05
First up in the news, the COVID-19 pandemic is causing a lot of
advertisers to pull back. I hear from those who are heavy on
Facebook ads that this is something that has caused prices to
significantly drop on Facebook. On LinkedIn, we are seeing
advertisers pull back so you're seeing maybe slight decreases in
CPMs or CPCs. You may see an increase in traffic as more and more
people are working from home. And maybe there's some unrest about
potential layoffs. And so they might be using LinkedIn to maybe
line up their next job or check and see other opportunities. So
this is a great time to be advertising on LinkedIn, because it's my
belief that B2B will always move a little bit slower than B2C. So
I'm guessing that b2b will recover much quicker and probably won't
take as much of a hit. So right now, while costs are a little bit
depressed, now is a good thing. To be running ads, and starting
those conversations with people who are maybe these are longer
sales cycles. So you're starting the relationship now, and not
asking immediately for a demo. For any type of advertising where
you are asking directly for a demo, let's say it's search ads, or
maybe you are using LinkedIn as a bottom of funnel type of
platform, then yeah, I think now would be a good time to either
pull budget or pull back. But if you're using LinkedIn as intended
to capture audience attention, and start to nurture that
relationship with something like, you know, free content, gated
assets, that kind of thing. Now's a really good time to continue to
spend while your competitors are all fearful. All right, as we move
into targeting here, LinkedIn has the most detailed business
targeting of any platform on the planet. We've talked about that
before. I love the fact that it's so scalable, it's access to this
audience, pretty much for anyone who's a white collar professional.
Plus, it was purpose built showcasing your professional self. So
it's the first and sometimes only place you go to tell when you
change positions. I like to joke that LinkedIn is the second person
to know when I make a career change after I tell my wife. It's got
unprecedented scale, since platforms like Facebook come and go with
popularity. But LinkedIn is a constant. I like to call it a low
level hum. LinkedIn doesn't always make a lot of noise, but it's
always there and always useful. And because of that low level hum,
it always seems useful, and it seems immune to pop culture
attention. So while Facebooks will come and go and become the
Myspaces, I think LinkedIn is here for the long haul. There's no
other platform that can replace it. The way you will notice the
unprecedented scale is it's really rare when one of our clients has
a budget that we can't actually spend on their very ideal target
audience. So that tells you the extent of the scale you get with
LinkedIn, with these white collar professionals. Certainly if
you're targeting someone who maybe LinkedIn isn't a perfect fit
for, like, let's say something like door to door salespeople, maybe
you're trying to recruit them. They're out knocking on doors all
day long and so they're not in front of a computer. But for the
most part, it's really not hard to spend any sort of budget you
have on the perfect audience on LinkedIn.
Now, as for how LinkedIn derives each of these targeting methods, we'll dive into that. And there are three main types. LinkedIn has a lot of the first two, and is starting to incorporate more of the third. So these types are Explicit Targeting, which means you're specifically told LinkedIn something about you. Then there's Implicit or Implied Targeting, meaning that the platform looked at something that you did give it and derived or guessed something about. And then the third is where there might be a behavioral an observational bent to this data. So LinkedIn may know something about you because of actions you take on the platform, not necessarily what you told it in an open field, or anything that it derived from something else. So each of these targeting types, I'll let you know whether it's derived explicitly, meaning it's going to be very accurate. Or maybe it's implicit, were based off of something you did give the platform, they're gonna make a guess about you, and it won't be as accurate, but likely, you'll get a lot more scale. We'll also talk about inclusion and exclusion in the targeting. Now, inclusion makes audiences smaller and much more targeted in general. I like to think of exclusions as just cutting out the pieces that you don't want. Like if you've ever been cutting a potato or peeling a potato, and it's got a few bad spots. exclusion on LinkedIn is a lot like cutting off those bad spots of the potato. And even just this year, we got access to Boolean targeting, which gives us the ability to specify and targeting or, or targeting now, and they will make your audience tighter, you could say something like, I want this job title, and this company size. And that means you will only get the people who have that exact job title, and are also at a company of that size. If you use or targeting, you're going to make your audiences much broader. And an example here that we've actually used would be something like we want this job title, or if you're a member of this group. And the reason you might want to do that is maybe there aren't enough job titles, or people who own that job title to spend your budget. But maybe if you have that job title, you're just as relevant as someone who went and joined a specific group about that topic that might give you the targeting you want. Back in episode two, we talked about the difference between targeting the right company versus the right individual. And for my experience, most of the time, we're combining these we want the right ideal role in the right type of company. And I like to use the example if you told me your ideal target audience are CFOs, but your product costs $1,200 dollars a month, I would tell you that you are your target audience is certainly CFOs, but not a two person company. So you'd want to combine larger companies that could actually afford what it was you were selling with the right role who would feel that pain point and you'd be able to help them out. The most useful filters for targeting people with roles are job title, job function, which is someone's department, their level of seniority skills on their profile, and groups that their members have. So those are my star five, that's my dream team have role filters. Then you have the company filters that will allow you to target things like company size by number of employees, the industry someone is in or their company is in, as well as company name for you account based marketing advertisers out there. Alright, let's break through each of the different targeting types, starting with geography. Now this is the only required targeting type. LinkedIn from the very beginning has always made you select a geography. So if you don't care about geography, you're okay with this worldwide, then you will have to specifically select all seven continents. This is definitely explicit targeting. On someone's profile, they will list where their geography is and this has recently been updated now with all of Microsoft and Bing's geolocation data. So it used to be that here in the state of Utah, we had two major metro area. There was Salt Lake, Metro up North and Provo Metro down South. And if you didn't want to target one of those two, you just have to target the whole state. Well, now with Microsoft and Bing's break down data, and this is already rolled out, you've already got access to this, you can target all the way down to the specific city, I would expect to have maybe difficulties with targeting people by granular areas like cities, at least for the next few years. Because when people originally set up their profile, they got to choose a metro area. Like for instance, I work with people outside of the state of Utah and all over the world. So even though I don't live right in the city of Salt Lake City, I still live in Salt Lake City metro as it's more recognizable. I actually work in a city called Lehi, which if you know Utah is the tech hub of the state, and I love it, but if you're not familiar, you may question if someone in a city called Lehi is actually good at what they do that this could be some Podunk town out in the sticks, you'd never know. So as long as people are actually updating their profile geography, then targeting all the way down to the city level will make sense In the future, right now, I think there will be a lag of people who originally set up their profile in a metro and haven't yet updated to a specific city. So you'll probably want to target a little bit more broadly, at least until that catches up. Then we get into the matched audiences. Now, there are three different kinds of matched audiences a fourth of you want to get real particular here. And we'll start with an email list upload. Now, this was something we got access to back in 2017. One of my favorite features on the platform, you can upload a CSV or an Excel sheet of up to 300,000 emails. And these can be either raw emails, or they can match a 256 Sha, an encrypted list of how email addresses might be obfuscated. So if you're working with an agency, for instance, and you don't want to give them a list, like let's say your whole customer list, you can export that as a 256 Sha encrypted list and LinkedIn will still take that and be able to recognize it. This is definitely explicit targeting because if you give LinkedIn an email address that they recognize, they will then target that person. And if they don't recognize it, they won't go about trying to target anyone. They're not making any guesses here. This is very, very useful for inclusion purposes. So for instance, if I wanted to target all of my current customers, I could upload this list of email addresses as a matched audience and run targeting against them to tell them about a deal I'm running or something like that. You might be tempted to run this as a suppression list or excluding it. And be aware that it doesn't work great as a suppression list, just because there's oftentimes a pretty low match rate between here's my email address and LinkedIn saying, Oh, yes, I know someone with that email address. I much prefer using company name or what they they'll call account match. As a suppression list. It's going to be a lot more accurate and cover more If your audience. Just like any sort of LinkedIn targeting, you do need at least 300 of the emails on your list to match with LinkedIn. Because you can't target any audience smaller than 300. Personal emails will match at a higher rate, which is great, because a lot of people are more willing to give you personal email addresses. But LinkedIn also does have a great database of people's professional emails. One of the great ways that they do this is if you are working with someone and you've sent them an email, then they can upload their email list into LinkedIn and say, Hey, show me people I'm not connected with already. And LinkedIn will allow them to send invites to people that they've emailed with, even if LinkedIn doesn't know who owns that. So what happens is you've received a connection request from someone over email that says, hey, so and so would like to connect with you. And as soon as you log in to LinkedIn and click accept, LinkedIn goes, Oh, this this personal email address you usually lost. With also matches to this work email address. So whereas on Facebook, you might have a huge personal match rate, but as soon as you upload a business address, it just goes to near zero on LinkedIn, there's going to be a pretty good match rate both with your personal emails, as well as pretty decent on professional. Now LinkedIn will let you know your match rate. But it's going to be pretty broad here, it might say something like 30%. Or maybe you have a list you pulled directly from LinkedIn. So there's theoretically 100% match rate, but they'll just tell you 90% or higher. Now, this makes a lot of sense with email addresses, because you probably wouldn't want someone to be able to tell whether that email address actually matched a LinkedIn profile. That seems like there could be some privacy concerns.
13:48
But as we move on to the next matched audiences feature called
account lists or account match, this is actually my favorite
matched audience. And this one, the match rate doesn't make quite
as much sense, but we'll get into that. You can upload a list of up
to 300,000 company names matched. And again, this is explicit
targeting. You tell LinkedIn, this company name we want to target.
And that person says I work for that company, and therefore the
match works. So this is explicit targeting. And I find this feature
extremely useful, both as an inclusion for here's a list of
companies I really care about, and I want to show specific ads to
as well as an exclusion as a suppression list like "Hey LinkedIn,
here is a list of all of my competitors, or my current customers or
my current and past customers, and any ad I show, I want you to
exclude these people from seeing my ads because I'm not going to
get any value out of a competitor clicking my ads and charging me
money". The gotchas here is that it does require the employee to
have claimed working for the company. page. So as long as the
employee came into the company after the company page was set up,
then this is going to make a lot of sense. It also requires the
company to have created a company page. Because if that company
page does not exist, and you put in some company name, LinkedIn
won't know who to match it to, because they won't see any employees
attached to it. This all is dependent on your company page itself.
Now, like I mentioned, the match rate here is pretty obfuscated,
and it's understandable with personal email addresses, but I get
really angry about it when it's around account names. The reason
why is because there's no privacy involved in a company name. So if
I uploaded a list and let's say I was trying to target IBM, and
that didn't match, LinkedIn is only going to tell me that it was
90% or higher matched. And I might have missed the fact that that
IBM didn't work, but if I would have typed I. B. M. it would have.
So I do wish that LinkedIn would actually give us a specific
percentage. And even let us know which account names did not match.
But so far that hasn't happened. You can add a web URL for a much
better match right here. And I highly recommend that if you can
pull a list of your company names, and then in the next column
over, you give the URL for that company that would totally solve
for that IBM issue I mentioned before, because LinkedIn would go
oh, I don't recognize IBM. Oh, but I do recognize ibm.com. Yeah,
that map's to I. B. M.
16:41
The third type of matched audience targeting here is retargeting.
Now this was one I was really excited for. And like we mentioned in
Episode Three retargeting is about to get a lot better, but as of
right now, it's it's pretty weak in how it works. It's 100% cookie
based retargeting, which means someone has to land on your website
that you have control of, and you've placed the LinkedIn pixel. And
then their browser has to accept cookies, which as of right now,
half of the browsers don't even accept cookies. That's all iOS
devices running Safari won't even accept the cookie. And anything
running the Mozilla Firefox browser also won't take it. And we know
within the next two years, Google Chrome has already announced a
sunset around third party cookies. And we also know that Microsoft
is never last to the conversation about privacy. And so I'm
guessing that Internet Explorer or edge will probably sunset
cookies before then. So within about two years, LinkedIn's
retargeting won't even work, but that's why the enhancements that
they're rolling out with engagement retargeting are so exciting to
me. This type of targeting is based on user behavior. It's once
you've landed on a page, we're going to stick that cookie on you
and make you eligible to be retargeted in the future. Now this is
only mildly useful right now for exactly the reasons I talked
about. But some additional things. The cookie pool minimum is 300.
Because on LinkedIn, you're not allowed to advertise to any
audience smaller than 300. So you have to have at least 300 people
in that retargeting pool. And because only 50% of browsers accept
the cookie, it makes it unreliable as a suppression list. So you
might say, if you've clicked on my ad, but didn't convert, now I
want to exclude you moving forward. And you could set up that rule,
but of course, only 50% of the browser's out there would actually
honor it. So you'd still be getting a whole bunch of return traffic
there on that campaign. The other benefits that are usually
associated with retargeting are that you'll be able to stay top of
mind as you remind people about your product or service. Well,
people just don't spend that much time on LinkedIn. And they're
just not super active in general, it's like three to four log ons
per month is average. And so there's not a whole lot of benefit in
retargeting people on LinkedIn, just so that they have an
opportunity to see your ad three or four times a month. Retargeting
is also usually very economical, but on LinkedIn, it's not really
the case. We oftentimes see costs lower than $1 per click coming
from Facebook and Google's retargeting. And on LinkedIn, it's
really rare when we see a retargeting click that's less than about
$4. So sure, you'll probably get some kind of discount, but it's
usually not big enough to really entice me.
19:36
Then the fourth element here of matched audience targeting is look
alikes. Now we waited for look alikes for a long time any of us who
have experience with Facebook Ads, the look alike targeting is one
of the best technologies Facebook has. So people were screaming for
it like "hey, LinkedIn, can you come out with look alikes just like
we have on Facebook?". And there just wasn't a good reason for
LinkedIn to have look alike functionality, because the original
targeting was so good. If you want a look alike, you can just go
and say I want to target everyone with that job title. Or you could
say if I like targeting that company, I'm going to target all of
the companies in its industry or of its size or both. So when
LinkedIn acquiesced, and actually gave us look alike targeting, it
just wasn't all that useful, because their original targeting was
so good originally. So because of that, I do call it mildly useful.
It is really good to create a look alike from your customer list
where you might not have specific titles or specific types of
companies, but you can let LinkedIn make those connections. It's
important to understand it's actually based off of the audience
expansion functionality that you find in every campaign selected as
default, which I'm not a fan of. But what I do like about look
alikes is that you can break it out into its own campaign. I never
use audience expansion just because it muddies my current audience.
But with a look alike, you pretty much get to use the same logic,
the same engine that gets you additional people, but you can run it
as a whole separate campaign so you can test. This is very much
implicit targeting because it's derived from people have likely
similar roles and also similar types of companies. And it is very
much a black box, we can't see what's happening. Plus on Facebook,
we get some really cool functionality this slider bar from one to
10%. Basically how tight do you want this look like to be? Do you
want it to be the most precise type of targeting this is really
really close. Or are you okay with most of it in there and Facebook
can just use a little bit of artistic license to add to it.
LinkedIn there's only one setting it's, here's my list, create a
look alike from it, and you're you are kind of stuck with whatever
it comes up with. If you're doing having any sort of account based
marketing approach where you're targeting by company name, do make
sure that you have not selected that audience expansion checkbox
because you're specifically telling LinkedIn, I want to target just
these companies. And then LinkedIn is going "Ooh, I know companies
that look like that". And they'll start to broaden your audience,
which you obviously don't want.
22:21
Then we move on to the company filters. We talked about how the
three major company filters were company name, company size, and
company industry. So we'll go through each of those. With company
name it's just like account match, where we could upload a list of
up to 300,000 company names with a few small intricacies here.
First of all, you are limited to only 200 company names per
campaign, which is really, really terrible to actually go and type
out 200 company names. It will be one of the worst things that you
do with your time. But the coolest part about it is if you will do
this, you will have a 100% match rate on your company names.
Because as you type IBM, LinkedIn will pop up a message that says
is this the company you mean, and you can make sure that you're
hitting that exact company. If you uploaded that same company list
into LinkedIn through a matched audience, it may not have 100%
match rate, and LinkedIn wouldn't even tell you which ones you were
missing. So if I'm ever targeting fewer than 200 companies per
campaign, then I'm going to use this feature just the company name
targeting. Now this is explicit. Someone does say I work for this
company and LinkedIn goes "Ah, I see that company's company page I
know that exists, I can match these up". And I do find this very,
very useful. We use company name targeting for account based
marketing campaigns all the time. Then company size. This is where
you can target a company by the number of employees it has. Some
people would like the ability to target by revenue target, for
instance. But LinkedIn asks people from the company page, hey, how
many employees do you have, and that number becomes gospel. And
that's what we are able to target. Because of that it is explicit.
The company page owner has to say we are this size of organization
for you to be able to target them by their company size. This is
very, very useful. We use this all the time. It's how we make sure
that we're targeting either the enterprise or small to medium sized
businesses or anything in between. The gotchas and nuances here are
specifically that most of the companies out there do not have a
company page profile, or I guess I'll say it like this. Most
LinkedIn members are not linked to a company page where LinkedIn
knows their size. So that means if you are using company size
targeting, you are probably going to exclude about half of everyone
on LinkedIn. Now this number has improved significantly. When I
very first got into LinkedIn Ads back in like 2011, it was
something like seven times more people did not have a known company
size. And now that's only 50/50. That's pretty good. We can
actually use this to our advantage, though, because a lot of people
are probably using company size targeting. But let's say that you
are specifically targeting smaller companies, let's say companies
with fewer than 50 employees. Rather than just targeting the
companies who are explicitly less than 50 employees. What you can
do is exclude all companies that are larger than 50. And what that
does is it gives you the companies of the smaller size that you're
looking for. But it also gives you all of the unknowns. And the
majority of the unknowns are probably from companies with fewer
than 50 people. It usually takes a marketing person to say, "hey,
we should probably own our profiles across the web". Keep in mind
that each person can fit under multiple company sizes because of
their multiple positions. So imagine that someone works in an
enterprise, a 5,000 and above size company. And maybe they have
their own consultancy on the side. Or maybe they're on the board of
some nonprofit. And so you might be targeting companies with 5000
or more employees, and then you get a lead from a tiny nonprofit.
That can happen sometimes with company size targeting just because
each member can be currently connected to more than one company.
Make sure you don't use company size as an exclusion just because
you're lazy and you don't want to select more checkboxes because
anytime you use company size exclusions, you're going to be left
with those who are undefined, which tend to be small. Now company
industry targeting this is where you can target someone by the
industry that they are in or their company is in. Now, that's a
really important distinction to make. This is explicit the member
on their individual profile gets to choose what industry they're
in. And they are also likely associated to a company page. And the
company page admin got to select an industry as well. So I might
have as my industry, marketing and advertising, but my company
might be in high tech or something like that. Same rules apply here
that if someone has multiple roles on their profile concurrently,
they can also qualify for more than one industry. Not to mention
I'm pretty sure they can be targeted by their company's industry
and or the industry they claim themselves. In addition to those
basic company targeting, there are a couple more that are related
to companies. So one's called company followers, and this is where
you can reach the followers of your company page. I say your
company page, and I mean it. You actually have to have admin access
to any company page to be able to use this targeting feature. And I
do wish that we could show ads to followers of our competitors, for
instance, but we can't do that you have to own the page to either
target your own followers or exclude them, which is more often what
we're doing with it. And that is pretty explicit as targeting goes.
Because if you're either following a company or you're not. This
can be really useful for let's say, if you're in the SaaS software
industry, it's really nice to show product update ads to the people
who are your users of your product. Because that way, when it's
time for your contract renewals to come up, you can remind them how
good your product was. So hopefully they resign again. I tend to
use this mostly as an exclusion, because if someone's already
following my company page, they're already seeing my content and
oftentimes ads for free anyway. So I might want to just exclude
them from my ads so that we're not paying for them. Your ads
account does have to be associated with your company page to make
this work. Then there's an odd one here called company connections,
where you can reach just the first degree connections of any
company you select. And companies are only available if they have
more than 500 employees. So you're not reaching the employees of
that company, you are reaching the first degree connections of the
employees, which I can't imagine a case where this would be really
incredibly useful. This is of course, explicit targeting, because
you're reaching just people who are first level connections and
this is very clear data. One good reason I can think of to use this
is messing with people. So maybe you want to target a competitors
first degree connections and maybe say something bad about the
competitor or embarrassed them in some way. And of course, all of
these people have a connection to that brand in some way. That
could be something you try if that's really your style. But more
often than not, but maybe more helpful on a serious note, you could
exclude this segment along with your competitors company name, if
there's something that you really don't want to get back to a
competitor, because you can exclude your competitors from seeing
your ads. But maybe one of their connections or one of their good
friends sees it and shoots them a screenshot of the ad that they
saw their competitor is running, and they might send it to their
friend and clue them in. So you can exclude your competitors as
well as their first degree connections and really be helpful that
that message isn't going to get back to them.
30:52
All right, then you have your age targeting. Now, this is really
important to understand that it is an implicit type of targeting
It's derived from the date that you started your first position
that you claim on your profile. This is important to understand
because no one ever put in their birthdate into LinkedIn, it'd be
pretty easy for them to ask that when they sign up. But no one ever
did that. And so LinkedIn is gonna look at it and say, ah, people
usually start to graduate from college around the age of, let's
call it 22 or something. And that means when you start your first
position, you're probably 22 around that time, and we can calculate
how old you are. This can be pretty inaccurate, especially because
you'll find some people who go "uh, my earlier career experience
wasn't related to marketing or wasn't really wasn't related to
sales, so I'm just going to leave that stuff off of my profile",
and then all of a sudden, LinkedIn thinks that you're 12 years old.
So I try not to use this facet unless I absolutely need to. And it
is pretty broad anyway. Then you've got gender which is also
implicit. It's really interesting because of how wrong this can be.
It only has two categories, male or female, I think they'll
probably give additional categories in the future just to be
sensitive to transgender. But this is derived based off of a
probability of someone's first name being either a masculine or a
feminine name. So we have a client whose name is Lenny. And it's a
man his name is is Lenny. But he gets ads all the time, like, "Hey,
are you a female executive?" And he's like, "No, definitely not".
So I would call gender maybe mildly useful, I would imagine it's
probably, I don't know, 90ish% accurate. So I try not to use it
unless I absolutely have to realizing that because it's just a
guess based off of someone's first name, there will be a little bit
of spillover in both directions. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break
and then we'll dive into the rest of the targeting options.
32:53
The LinkedIn Ads show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com,
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33:02
That's right you know it, B2Linked is the LinkedIn Ads focused
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B2linked.com to get in touch, and our team can help you enact these
and other strategies to get you the very best.
33:20
Alright, let's jump into the rest of the targeting options. So next
we have degrees. Now, this is explicitly derived from the profile.
When you go to add education, it will ask you what your degree is.
And I would say in the Higher Ed segment, this is a really, really
useful and important type of targeting. As a gotcha though, there
are so many degree names. You can have a Bachelor of Science in
marketing, a Bachelor of Arts and marketing and a bajillion of
other options. So be aware there. If you are specifically trying to
target one type of person, you'll probably want to type in
something like for instance, if you're going after marketers,
you'll type in marketing or you'll type in bachelor's, and then
just scroll through that big list trying to find anything that is
relevant. Next is field of study. This is also explicitly added
from your profile when you add an education. You get to say what
you studied. So for me, it was marketing, I studied marketing. And
this can be really helpful for Higher Ed types of targeting. And
there are so many different fields of study. So be aware, again,
like degrees, you'll probably be trying to target by a lot of
different variations. Then you've got schools, again, this is an
education. This is explicit, someone says I went to this
University, and it is optional to add, but most people probably do,
I think most are pretty proud of their school and their degree, so
they will add it even if optional.
34:46
Then we get into some of my very favorite targeting criteria here.
These are the ones that are helpful for targeting the individual.
So job function is the department that someone works in. They say
they call it job. function in my mind, I just tell myself
department. And this is derived from several different things in a
profile. LinkedIn told me they are in the process of updating and
changing how this is done. But at least when I was informed about
it many, many years ago, this was derived from your job title, your
industry, and I believe it was skills, but it might have been
something else. So they match those three, three things together
and try to figure out what departments you fit in. Each member can
have multiple from a single position. So let's say your job title
is Chief Financial Officer or CFO, LinkedIn looks at that and goes,
Oh, well, you are 100% in the finance job function, but we're also
going to put you at 16% in the business development function, which
is what a lot of C Executives fit into. So you can have one person
fit multiple departments or job functions. Because this is pulled
from some other things in your profile like your title, your
industry and skills, that does make it implicit, which means it's a
little bit less accurate. But it is LinkedIn's broadest targeting.
And we find this to be really helpful in combination with other
elements, like company name, for instance. So if I ever tried to
overlay job title on top of company name, I would likely not hit
nearly as many people on my audience size as I wanted to. But
because job function is so broad, I love it in conjunction with
other types of targeting that make it quite tight. Now, here's a
nuance that you won't know until you go and try to do it. And then
LinkedIn tells you you can't, you can't combine job function and
job title in almost any way. That means as inclusions or
exclusions, and that is because job function is derived from job
title. So they look at it and go well, you can't exclude one from
the other because they come from the same pot. Something
interesting that we found out when LinkedIn came out with the
segment breakdown several months ago, where you can look at
audiences and see what LinkedIn categorizes them as we did the job
title of CEO, and then went to go look at the job function of a
CEO, because we've always been curious, like, what is a CEO? What
is what department does the does LinkedIn think that it fits into,
and CEOs are near 100% business development, which is odd to me, it
didn't make sense, but I'm glad that I at least know. And of
course, that opened it up to us learning a lot more about how
LinkedIn categorizes these job functions. For another example here,
sales manager job title, if you go into segment breakdown, LinkedIn
calls them 98% sales, but 6% operations 5% business development, 4%
marketing and 2% support, which is odd that they would have such
small percentages. I would imagine that they are those percentages
in certain industries, which tells us why they're so low
38:01
Then you have seniority and seniority we use almost all the time.
It is a fantastic filter. And it is also implicit from your job
title. It's derived from the perceived level of your job title.
This is really easy when you have something like a manager,
director, VP kind of title, but obviously more nebulous if you have
something like specialist, analyst, consultant, those types of
things. We find this one extremely useful. We use it all the time
like I sai. There are quite a few gotchas and nuances with the job
seniority filter, for instance, one of the options is unpaid. And I
just wonder from the job title, how do they know that they're
unpaid? If you go into segment breakdown, LinkedIn says the
majority of unpaid jobs in your 30s have at least 12 years of
experience. So and that's 15% of them was the biggest amount in
that list. And so I look at it and go "wait, does that mean that
they're categorizing CEOs or really senior people as unpaid"? It
didn't seem like it jive to me. Then they have training again, I
wonder how do they know that someone is in training 61% of people
in training are in education. And then if you look at the years of
experience 9% of training are in the 12 or more years of experience
bucket. And then there's 7% in the 1, 2, 3, 4 years of experience
bucket. So I wonder if they're training, what's this connection,
two years of experience. And then there's entry level. 22% of entry
level are registered with over 12 years of experience. So again, I
maybe I'm wondering a little bit about that. Not quite sure how
accurate it would be. Then senior, so many people get senior wrong
as a seniority. What it means is when I think senior, I think
individual contributors. This is someone who manages projects and
things, but not people. And the thing everyone gets wrong. They go,
"oh yeah, we're targeting senior managers or senior directors or
senior VPS". That's not what it means. It doesn't mean you have a
senior in your title, it means that you are an individual
contributor. And then I look at that and go wait 36% of senior
seniorities have 12 plus years of experience. So again, years of
experience seems maybe unreliable at this point.
40:28
There's a manager seniority, which we end up using a lot. LinkedIn
calls this a people manager. And I again, I wonder if you have
manager in your title, how does LinkedIn know that you manage
people and not just projects and things? Something interesting if
you're looking at manager seniority, 4% of those people are also in
Director, 3% are also owners, 2% are VPS, so again, that breakdown
maybe leaves me with some more questions than I had before.
Director, VP, CXO all of those make pretty good sense to me. And
when I looked at owner as a seniority, it's like CEO because it's
near 100% business development as a job function. I thought that
was interesting. Partner, I oftentimes will equate owner and
partner together. Partners are qualified as 57% business
development and 53% entrepreneurship. So I guess that makes sense.
It's just interesting to see how LinkedIn slices it. Okay, then we
have job titles. Now, because your job title is a free form field,
you can write whatever you want in there. And so LinkedIn is
attempting to look at your title and understanding and equate it to
other people's titles to try to build this model around it and
understand which job titles make sense. When you look at it,
though, LinkedIn only understands about 30% of the job titles out
there. So that means that when you're using this targeting facet
70% of your audience won't be reachable with this. It is explicit
and it's going to be very accurate because someone really had to
closely match a job title for LinkedIn to understand it. We find
this to be really useful. And we use it around a lot around roles.
In fact, we probably use this with every single client, we are
usually running a job title campaign for a role. Through the API,
we queried and found that there are 30,223, so just over 30,000
unique titles on LinkedIn. And there are other known titles that
roll up under those, which means your LinkedIn has 30,000 that you
can type in and it will match that there are a whole bunch of
others that LinkedIn says roll up to that that we can't see. What's
been interesting to me for a long time is you know, here in
marketing I know a lot of people who have PPC or demand Gen in
their job title. And I've been waiting for like nine years now for
when I type in PPC or demand Gen into a job title that LinkedIn
will match with something. So LinkedIn tells me that they would
roll up under things like digital marketing. But because I can't
see it, I just don't know if maybe their index is really old,
they're not looking at more current titles, maybe it's not updated
very often. Or maybe LinkedIn understands all of these titles
fantastically and I just don't know. Because most marketers go to
LinkedIn because of the job title targeting, it's the first thing
they they go to, it's the first thing they try out. This does tend
to be some of the most competitive inventory out there. And because
LinkedIn only understands about 30% of job titles, that means that
there's diminished audience inventory, but demand for that
inventory is higher, because this is job title targeting that
people really like to use. So because of that job title targeting
is going to be some of the most expensive targeting that you do.
And you just expect it's going to be very accurate. It's going to
give you more or less smaller audience sizes, and it's going to
cost more, but probably give you very good lead quality. If you're
targeting standard job titles like sales manager, HR manager,
you'll probably capture the majority of them. Those are very easy
titles for LinkedIn to understand. But then that also means that
those are very easily reachable for less money with something like
job function, and seniority. And because members can have multiple
positions listed concurrently on their profile, let's say something
like you work for a fortune 500 in the daytime, but you're also on
the board of a nonprofit or you do consulting on the side so you
have both titles currently running. That also means that you can
qualify as multiple job titles. Then we have skills, another one we
use all the time. These are explicit because each member can claim
up to 50 skills on their profile when they sign up. And these are
always things you can go and edit later. They are more specific
than job title. So for instance, I might have the job title of
digital marketing manager but I think might be really highly
specialized in LinkedIn Ads, or Google Ads or Facebook Ads. So
those types of ads, the channels themselves would be under skills
quite easily. But I couldn't reach that person just from their job
title, unless I wanted to go broader, like digital marketing
manager that really could be managing anything, anything paid
organic, social search, whatever. It does aid and giving us broad
audiences. And so it is very, very useful. Also, for things like
overlaying on top of lists of companies for ABM lists, this can be
great for that. As for the nuances here, each member can have up to
50. But it's also not the strongest signal. So for instance, I took
a SQL class one time SQL, a database class, and because of that, I
put SQL as a skill on my profile, but certainly you wouldn't want
to try to sell me a database management software. It's not what I
do primarily. It's just one thing. I was proud of I liked. If you
wanted to try to target people like me who might have a job title
of ad specialist or PPC something, because there's no PPC job title
skills can be a great way to reach someone like me who maybe
LinkedIn just didn't understand their job title. One thing I would
absolutely love, people claim skills and you can endorse each
other, you've probably done this a lot, you've probably received a
lot of endorsements. I wish that we could either bid up bid higher
on people who had more endorsements on certain skills, the ones
that were bidding on, and maybe even ignore, if you only have three
or fewer endorsements around a skill, maybe I don't want to target
you. And that would be really cool. I've given this feedback to
LinkedIn, please give it to your reps as well. I think that'd be
awesome. Skills, back in the day used to be free form and I think
this was probably sometime around 2014 when this changed, you could
write any skill you want. So we used to play jokes with this, we
would nominate other people in assigned skills like snowboarding to
to friends trying to get them things like contracts or influence or
attention in sports. So now they have enough skills out there that
you're kind of forced, there are a certain number of skills you can
put in. I don't know how often these are updated. I don't know how
often they add new skills. But certainly this is something that
you're kind of closed into a box now.
47:21
Years of experience is another pretty interesting one. Again, just
like age, this is implicitly drawn from the date you started your
first claim position. The definition would be the number of years
you've been in the professional world realize that it's only mildly
useful because it is very implicit and you just never know how
accurate it's going to be. I think rather than age or years of
experience that seem very prone to error, I would much rather use
seniority that doesn't seem nearly as prone to error. Then groups I
absolutely love groups targeting. Now don't mistake this. This is
targeting people who are members of certain groups, it doesn't mean
that your ads are going to be shown when they're logged into the
group, I get that question quite a bit. This is very explicit. In
fact, you have to go way out of your way on LinkedIn right now to
join a group. And I don't think LinkedIn is very proud of their
group's product right now because you really, really have to go out
of your way. If you're searching for a group, you've got to get
like four clicks deep before you're ever even seeing an option for
groups. I think this is very, very useful. Because if you're
passionate enough about a topic to go and join a group all about
it, you're probably really relevant to what I'm trying to sell you.
Back when LinkedIn was really proud of their group's product, and
they were really highly used. A lot of people joined groups and
then kind of forgot about them, and they're still part of it, which
is great. It means when I use group targeting, I'm going to have
larger audience sizes, but realize that may not be quite as up to
date. And because fewer people are members of groups, these will
usually give you a smaller audience sizes.
48:59
Then you have member interests. There are currently 11 broad
interests, and then they break down into a bunch of more micro and
niche interests. It's interesting that these are part of the third
category of how targeting is determined. These are part of the
behavioral or observed category. The way they do it is looking at
what you interact with in the feed. So subjects that you're posting
on subjects that you are completing social actions on, like liking,
commenting, and resharing. And if they can get the data from you,
if you do any sort of searches on Bing, they will pull from your
Bing search history to try to figure out what you're interested in.
I think this is not very useful. I don't use interests a whole lot
it just because of how broad they are and how prone to error. My
big question is, what does someone have to do to be labeled as
interested in a certain topic? Is it like you hit the like button
once on a post about that topic? Or do you have to comment three
times? Or is it a single search on Bing? Is it 15 searches on Bing
with a keyword?, we just don't know this. So I would suggest using
it for things like paring down an audience when there just isn't a
reason for you to be targeting a million people. But your targeting
isn't tight enough to get it down to like a very small group, we
might overlay interests just to give yourself a better shot. It's
also really interesting to look at your audience's interests just
to see how much faith that you are willing to put in. So what you
could do is put in the job title of someone that you're trying to
target, then you look in the right rail under the breakdown, the
segment breakdown, and look under interests just to see does it
jive? Are you targeting developers and there's a ton of stuff about
like Bitcoin? Maybe that's maybe that makes sense. If you're
targeting developers, and there's a ton about travel or Instagram
influencers or something like that, I wouldn't have as much faith
in it.
50:56
Then you've got some new stuff called member traits. Now Member
traits used to be something called custom segments that was beta
targeting that you only got access to, if you had a LinkedIn Rep.
And what's really cool is they're starting to slowly roll these
out. And at one point, there was something like 30, or 40 different
custom segments that your LinkedIn rep had access to. And now I
think they've released maybe four or five of them. And I hope they
keep going. I think these are so so cool. They are also behavioral
and observed types of facets. But what's so cool about them is
LinkedIn knows a lot about you because of your behavior on the
platform. And so I feel like these are a lot more trustworthy.
There's still tons that haven't been released yet. So definitely
ask your rep if they have any ideas for custom segments that might
be good for the audience that you go after. There's one called
frequent contributor, obviously, I don't know what their baseline
is for how many times you have to post or comment on something to
be a frequent contributor, but it's there. This There's one called
frequent traveler. And I think they know because if you're on the
mobile app and you log into LinkedIn, from IP addresses that go
across the country across the globe, they know that you're a
business traveler. There's one called job seeker that this one
makes a lot of sense. If someone has viewed at least three job
postings, or applied to any one of them. LinkedIn goes, "ah,
they're looking for a job", so you can target them pretty easily.
There's one called open to education. There's one called device
preference. And device preference is really interesting to me. I
don't know where we're all the way there yet. But it'll break down
into do they prefer desktop or mobile for their LinkedIn
experience. And under mobile, you can actually break down to iOS
and Android. It is called preference and it doesn't mean the device
they're on. I believe this just means the the device that they tend
to use the most often, so not quite as accurate as I have liked,
but certainly that gets us closer. I certainly expect more coming
out here because there's a lot of custom segments we've used in the
past that aren't in the list yet. As for how useful these are, it
really is a yard sale or a garage sale, whatever you want to call
it, where you just have to look at the list and maybe something
applies. Maybe something doesn't. It's really unorganized or
disorganized. But there's lots of good options, maybe something is
a good fit for you. So check that those out. Then you have
something called audience templates. Now, audience templates are
different from our member traits, because they don't involve
anything that's behavioral. These are just templates that LinkedIn
has built for you that make it easier to target certain types of
people. So for instance, there's one that's expertise in Bitcoin.
And if you actually apply this, you see that all LinkedIn did is
they just automatically applied all of the Bitcoin and blockchain
groups targeting. Then there's financial advisors and then all they
did was added all of the job titles that financial advisors seem to
have, and added some finance industries on to it, you can choose IT
decision makers, but this is just job function of IT with a
seniority of like manager and above. There's nurses, there's
medical doctors, these are ones that mostly rely on job title.
There's also degrees which you can exclude, which is really helpful
for Higher Ed. This one, again, is kind of a yard sale, you don't
know if there's going to be something that fits your audience or
not until you look and there's 26 out there right now. So check
those out when you get a chance.
54:37
So my recommendations for you as you're designing your targeting,
use explicit as much as you possibly can. This is going to give you
the highest lead quality, it's going to be the most precise, and
this is so much of the reason why we like LinkedIn is this
precision in targeting. So when you need quality, go explicit on
your targeting options, and then use the implicit ones, when you
just need volume, and you're okay with a little bit of error. Most
of the time, you're going to need a little bit of a mix. And I
really like testing these targeting methods against each other. For
instance, if I have an audience like sales manager, I'm probably
going to test job title of sales manager, and job function of sales
with manager seniority against each other. And I want these in two
separate campaigns. And I want to see which one gives me more
volume, lower cost, better efficiency down the funnel. Because I
understand the need for quality versus volume. And it's kind of a
sliding scale in most cases, I would use job function with
seniority on an ABM list on an account list anytime. But if I'm
just using LinkedIn's native targeting to reach every one of this
role in North America, I'd be much more likely to use job titles or
even groups that really narrow it down. Alright, so I've got the
episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around
56:04
Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads show. Hungry for more?
AJ Wilcox, take it away.
56:15
All right, here are the resources for this week. Anyone looking to
get into LinkedIn Ads check out course that I did with LinkedIn
Learning. The link is right there in the show notes. I've said this
on previous episodes, but it covers about the first hour and a half
of the trainings that I give people one on one and charge $500 an
hour for and I think it's only $25 bucks so it's a great value.
Definitely check that out. That will get you up to speed in
LinkedIn Ads pretty quick. It's also free if you have LinkedIn
premium.
56:45
On whatever podcast player you are on right now. Please look down
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podcast and certainly the offers always on the table. Reach out to
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future you'd like us to feature talk about, discuss, or dive into.
And we will see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your
LinkedIn Ads initiatives.