Apr 28, 2020
Show resources:
Cities that tanked and others that didn't with jobs from
covid.
LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising
Course
Video ad
specs
Carousel ad specs
Single image
ad specs
Text ad
specs
Message
ads specs
Conversation ad
specs
Dynamic ad
specs
Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.
Transcript:
Four different ad formats with 10 plus variations. No wonder y'all are confused about how to create LinkedIn ads. Let's get it.
0:13
Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.
0:20
Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. So you guys ask me all the time
about the different ad formats on LinkedIn? Which one should I use?
Which one performs best? We're going to go into all the pros and
cons of each one, and which situations to use them in. So we're
going to hit it. But first, let's talk about the news. Obviously,
this is going to roll out a little bit later because I record a
little bit earlier. But COVID-19 is all throughout the news. So I
wanted to share a little bit about how people are talking about
COVID and how people are using LinkedIn because of it. LinkedIn,
let me know that 33% of the posts right now are related to
Coronavirus or COVID-19. And then of course topics like remote
working, social distancing, those things have definitely seen at
least made a showing in the types of content being shared. There's
been a 19% increase in the number of posts about remote work, 8%
increase in social distancing, 6% of additional posts on online
collaboration. So definitely, we see a whole bunch more. What else
was interesting though, to me is that we're seeing the hashtag
#webinar as one of the fastest growing hashtags. And I think this
definitely signals the need for brands to move to virtual events.
So more people are doing webinars and virtual events and talking
about them. It definitely seems like smaller companies are the ones
getting involved, because those companies with 1 to 200 employees
are the ones driving the increase in posting, whereas enterprises
are actually posting a little bit less, they're only down about 1%
pre-COVID. But you know, even with that, you figure the bigger
enterprises are probably being disrupted more and pulling back and
maybe the more nimble, smaller organizations are deciding to, you
know, this is the time to speak up. One cool article I'll share in
the show notes is called as US hiring skids, Atlanta and five other
cities fight back. And it's a really cool article where LinkedIn's
economic graph team actually did some research based off of who's
hiring and who's not in the largest metropolitan areas. And there's
a really cool graph in here where they show pre-COVID, especially
what hiring rates looked like. And then afterwards, you can see,
surprise, surprise from the title of the article, Atlanta is doing
really well. But you'll want to jump on and check out and see how
did Atlanta do compared to Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, New York,
and San Francisco. Some other really cool stats here on posting,
LinkedIn says that there has been an 8% increase in weekly posting
on pages. So companies, like we said, are getting more involved.
There's been a 10% increase in content shared by pages, so
definitely more more active in the feed just doing more 16%
increase in lead gen campaigns. And then of course, you wouldn't be
too surprised to hear that there's been a 78% increase in
Coronavirus related videos. 26% increase in original posts with
video. So just people are sharing more video right now. And then a
13% increase in thought leadership. And there's been a 13% increase
in sharing industry news from third party articles. Something else
really cool. This is you're going to hear this two weeks after we
found out about it. But LinkedIn just barely this week released two
new types of targeting. One of the new targeting is called company
category. So you get to it by going to company and then company
category. And there's a whole bunch in here of different types of
company categories. You can target many having to deal with Fortune
or Forbes. So there's Forbes fastest growing companies. There's
Fortune 500 companies, which is something we've been asking for for
a long time, this is great. LinkedIn's news editors actually have
their own list of top companies by country. And so you can use
these classifications to make sure you're hitting just the very
fastest growing the very largest companies on the planet. It's
awesome for those who are especially in the enterprise. But then
the one that I'm actually arguably more interested in is called
company growth rate. Now, you access this one the same way you go
to company and then company growth rate. And there are options here
like 0% to 3%, company growth, 3% to 10%, company growth 10% to
20%. And then 20% and above. You can actually even target negative
growth companies, so those who are pulling back on the reins. Now,
immediately when I saw this, I was asking, okay, how did LinkedIn
get this data? Because it can't be by company size. Because if you
look at just the company size buckets that LinkedIn has 1 to 10 or
11 to 50, 51 to 200, etc, just bumping from the next bucket up,
you'd be looking at growth rates in the 60 to 90% range. So we know
that LinkedIn is not pulling this from the data recorded by company
page admins, as they are increasing their company sizes. And this
is actually really good because if you relied on people to give
just that data, I think it would be largely inaccurate. Company
page admins just don't go in to update their company sizes all that
often. But then I started thinking about it. LinkedIn, can actually
know how big your company is based off of how many employees are
adding them as an employer. So this is data that LinkedIn doesn't
give us. But every new employee who comes to work for you can go
and set you as their employer and LinkedIn sees this data. And this
goes all the way down to a granularity of one. So even if you're in
an industry where, let's say only 30% of your employees are even on
LinkedIn, it doesn't matter. LinkedIn is calculating here a percent
growth or percent change. And so as long as you know, one or two or
three people come in and associate themselves to your company page
and say they work for you, LinkedIn can see that growth, which I
think is awesome. All right, now let's get down to the individual
ad formats on LinkedIn. And we'll go through the pros and cons and
all of that good stuff. We're going to start out with my favorite,
which is sponsored content. Now, there are several different
variations of sponsored content. So we'll cover each one. But here
are the basics of just all types of sponsored content. You can
expect about 80 plus percent of your traffic to come from mobile
devices, because your sponsored content comes in the newsfeed and
the majority of feed users are mobile. The homepage experience both
on desktop and mobile is to dump you right into the feed. So you
will see a lot of interaction there. We expect somewhere around
0.4% click through rate, so a little bit under half a percent. And
we generally expect to see a cost per click anywhere between about
$8 to $11. The floor though is variable. So that what that means is
for one audience, you might bid all the way down and find out that
your floor is $5 and 50 cents. And then for a different audience,
you might find that it's $6 and 27 cents or something like that. So
you just have to find that floor by just reducing your bids until
LinkedIn screams at you and tells you what the floor is.
7:35
So then we start looking at single image ads, which is, again, my
very favorite version of sponsored content, because it's the
simplest, it's the least risky. I ended up recommending this type
of ad format to about 95% of advertisers. It's such a great starter
ad format, because it's so simple to troubleshoot. It's made up of
really three elements. There's text up Above at the top of the ad,
which is called intro text, and that's by far the most important
piece. Then you have a big beautiful image that's 1200 pixels wide
by 627 tall. And then down below, you have a headline. Now for your
intro, you want to make sure that you keep it under about 150
characters for that intro, so that it doesn't truncate and show the
See More link. For the headline down below, keep it under about 70
characters and a little bit less if you want to make sure it
doesn't get truncated on mobile. Our ideal we found if we keep it
under about 130 characters for the intro and about 60 for the
headline, we tend to see better performance, but certainly your
mileage may vary here.
8:45
Then the next variation here is carousel ads. Now I recommend
carousel ads about zero percent of the time and the reason why is
because there there are a lot of work to create. You have to use a
different image size and you can have up to 10 cards in an ad, but
creating each card, you have to have your own unique, visual
creative, and it gets its own headline. So if I had to create a
carousel ad with four cards in it, it would be about the same
amount of work as creating four separate single image ads. So it's
a lot harder to create it, it's more effort. And for that effort, I
don't see us getting rewarded very much. There doesn't seem to be a
huge increase in performance, and there's certainly no reduction of
cost. So I don't end up recommending this very often, unless you
have visual creative that tells a really interesting story in these
tiles that you can scroll through. One potential good use here
might be if you were, if you're advertising, some kind of maybe an
online summit, and each card you could show a different headshot of
one of your keynote speakers, so people get a feel for you know,
here are the types of speakers you might hear from if you register
the same rules apply a single image here, where you get the same
hundred and 50 characters for an intro. But then each card only
gets 45 characters for a headline. And each image on the card needs
to be formatted to 1080 by 1080.
10:15
The next variant is video ads. Now I end up recommending video ads
only to about 5% of advertisers. And that generally means these are
going to be the 5% of advertisers who are expert at video, they've
already aced their creative on about every other network. And so
when they come to LinkedIn, they already know that their creative
is very high performance. And so it's a really easy translation.
There are three different ways you can pay for video ads. Most
people know the two second video view or the impression. Many don't
know that you can actually also bid by the click which is the the
least risky version and my favorite. So if I have video creative,
I'm going to test it in a website visits objective first If it
performs well to the click, then I can start testing. If I could
save even more money to bidding by two second view or by the
impression. There are three different formats for your video. You
can do 16 by 9, which is just the normal it's 1920 by 1080. We've
been able to do square for a while, which is 1920 by 1920, or even
smaller sizes throughout. And that makes it nice for both mobile
and desktop. But what's new that LinkedIn just released is vertical
video. So now you can do video that's 1080 wide by 1920 tall. And
this is great for specifically targeting the mobile users. If you
have video creative that is formatted for vertical, it's actually
only going to show up on mobile devices. So if you wanted to
segment only to mobile devices, that could be a good way to do it.
My recommendation is to keep all of your video under 30 seconds if
possible, because if it's much longer, you will have Either most
people not willing to stay and watch or a huge drop off before the
end. So be brief. Also keep in mind, the same rule for all of
social video applies here, it's going to start playing
automatically, and it's going to play a muted, which means you want
your thumbnail, the very first frame in the video should be
something exciting. So if the video hasn't loaded yet, as they're
scrolling by, it at least catches their eye. And then because the
sounds off and 80% of people are going to watch it, totally with
the sound off, you want to make sure that your subtitles are great.
You can do this two different ways. You could either burn subtitles
into the video file itself, which is really safe. Or you can
generate an SRT file, a .SRT subtitles file. There are lots of
different ways you can do this. You could go and pay rev.com $1 per
minute to transcribe for you and created a dot SRT file. But then
you upload that .SRT file as you upload the video, and LinkedIn
will attach the subtitles to it and you'll be off to the races. My
biggest qualm with LinkedIn video ads is that there just hasn't
been an ability to retarget the traffic. So we pay LinkedIn premium
prices, but then we can't do anything with it if they don't end up
clicking. But this of course, changes in October in October, at
least so far, it's looking like October, LinkedIn is going to be
releasing engagement retargeting to the public, and then we'll be
able to say something like if you've watched 50% of my first video,
now I want to show you the second one in the sequence. Now my
strategy here is if I can launch my video ads with CPC bidding,
where I'm only going to pay by click, if I'm running this against
other ads to the same audience, similar message, static image. If I
can get my costs per click anywhere close on the video ads to the
static ad, then I'm going to be happy running video ads. I know I
can communicate way more emotion through video than I can from a
static image. So if my cost per click is anywhere close, I'm
assuming my lead quality is going to be better. And so I'm willing
to pay, you know, maybe 10%, 20% more per click for a video. But if
I'm paying double or triple for a video view, click, then I'm going
to be happier running a static ads. Format here is it needs to be
mp4 and it needs to be under 200 megabytes in file size. And you'll
want to shoot at less than 30 frames per second because LinkedIn
can't handle more than that. You can check out the link to the
video add specs if you want to go deeper. Those are in the show
notes below.
14:49
Next, we have a variation that can be applied to any type of
sponsored content and actually any type of sponsored messaging ad
too, and that is of course lead gen forms. Now, lead gen forms are
really interesting. And they have been an absolute game changer for
so many of our clients. And what they are, is if you interact with
one of these ads, you click on it, a drawer will slide down with a
form within the ad itself. That means there's no waiting for a new
landing page to load. There's no assessing, do I trust this site or
not? Because they're staying on LinkedIn. LinkedIn even sweetens
the pot a little bit by auto filling all the fields that they know
for the prospect. So if you're only asking for first name, last
name, login email address. I really like asking for LinkedIn
profile URL, that's a great one. So you don't have to ask for much
else. You can get everything through that. Then this form is going
to be totally auto filled. And if the prospect is interested, all
they have to do is hit the submit button. Because LinkedIn has made
this so frictionless. You will see incredibly high converting
rates, we find that our conversion rates are most of the time 10%
to 50%, higher. And we've definitely seen some times where
conversion rates will double or even triple. Now, certainly lead
gen forms are amazing, but they're not always a silver bullet.
Because of that, I only recommend them to about 60% of advertisers.
And the reason why is when you are using a lead gen form, that user
it was so easy for them to fill out the form. Sometimes they don't
even remember having filled out the form. And so if you contact
them three days later, they may say, I'm pretty sure I didn't
request any information from you, or I've never heard of you
before. And it just generally leads to a lower quality of lead.
Facebook advertisers will tell you this all day long with
Facebook's lead ads, which is essentially the same product. Lots of
times people assume Well, if all the form fields just filled out
automatically, then people won't mind how much info I'm asking for.
Well, that's not true. We've actually found that the more fields we
ask for, we can scare people away, even if it's a lead gen form. So
we suggest asking for fewer fields. But just be aware, whatever
you're asking for, it will probably convert 10% to 50% higher as a
lead gen form than it would if you send them to a landing page.
Once someone actually fills out a form, LinkedIn is not going to
deliver it to you super easily. So you're going to have to get the
lead out of LinkedIn and into whatever system you're using. If you
happen to be using salesforce.com, Marketo, Eloqua, HubSpot, live
ramp, Microsoft Dynamics and a few others, then you're very much
taken care of. There is a native integration there ready for you.
But if you're not using one of their native integrated partners,
you'll want to use Zapier.com. On their $20 a month plan, they can
pipe your leads from LinkedIn into pretty much any CRM or marketing
automation system out there. Like I mentioned, these lead gen forms
can be attached to any type of sponsored content, or any type of
message ads, which we'll get to here in a moment. They're a great
way to reduce friction in your whole advertising process. So if
you're having a hard time getting someone to, let's say, hop on the
phone for a free consultation, maybe you have a super low
conversion rate on your landing page, it's definitely worth trying
as a lead gen form. Because it's taking so much of the friction
away. I found that lead gen forms are by far the cheapest way to
get your very qualified types of prospects into your email list for
nurturing. They're just as no cheaper way to do that on LinkedIn.
So this is great for just reducing your cost per lead. We talked
about the lead quality generally being perceived as lower, and that
is very, very true. We also see some other weaknesses, which is why
I don't recommend these to 100% of advertisers. Because the traffic
never lands on your website. You don't Don't get to track it with
UTM parameters or any sort of analytics that you do. And you also
can't retarget that traffic, at least yet, in October we'll be able
to. So if your goal is to make as strong of an impression as
possible on a super high value prospect, then I would still send
them to a landing page. But certainly if your goal is just to get
the cheapest cost for getting your ideal prospects into your
funnel, so that you can then nurture them, then lead gen forms win
hands down every time.
19:31
Then we move on to the text ads. I love text ads, they are very
under appreciated, because they were the original ad format back in
the day, these launched back in 2008. And they were the only ad
format until 2013. When sponsored content launched. I love them so
much because they are they utilize the same targeting as all the
other ad formats. So you know your lead quality is going to be high
and they're also the least expensive ad out there. The floor is
static, they are always $2 per click at the floor. And you'll
likely end up paying somewhere between about $3 to $5 per click. So
if you're just trying to dip your toe in the water in LinkedIn Ads,
and not spend a whole lot and just get a feel for what the lead
qualities like, I would recommend text ads. The big downside to
text ads is really, they're very low click through rate. The
average click through rate we see from these is .025%. Put into
perspective, that is two and a half clicks out of every 10,000
times these ads are displayed. So very, very low click through
rate. You'd have to have either a very large audience or a click
through rate that is much higher than average to really spend much
budget at all. If you were into Google ads or AdWords back in the
day, this will feel very familiar. We get a 25 character headline
on these and then a 75 characters Description, which is the old
AdWords was 35 and 35, for description lines. So LinkedIn gave us
an extra five combined for a description, we also get a 100 by 100
pixel image, which is most often reduced to 50 x 50. The low click
through rate can be a little bit of a liability, it means it's hard
to spend too much money on them. And you might wonder if it's worth
your time to actually set up because of how little traffic it runs.
But I want to tell you about something that I really appreciate,
which is you get tons of free branding. The frequency cap on these
is something like 20 impressions per day per member. So imagine
everything your ideal prospects are doing. They're seeing your logo
in front of their face constantly. That can be very powerful. We've
seen a lift as much as 15% when we're running sponsored content,
and then we launch text ads to the same audience. We'll see 15%
higher click through rates in our sponsored content. So there is
power in combining these for sure. These are over in the right rail
only on desktop, so you might not even remember having seen them.
They usually show up in a three pack, sometimes there's a two pack.
And very often, the top bidder will appear at the very top of the
page in an ad format that LinkedIn used to sell individually called
the one by one, but it's just a single line of text at the very top
of your browser. I mentioned these are super low risk. And the
reason why is because they don't get clicked on very much. So it's
really hard to spend too much budget, and when they get clicked,
it's usually a really inexpensive click. So if you're looking for
just low risk getting the cheapest clicks possible, and you like
the idea of 100% of this traffic being from a desktop because this
isn't even available on mobile devices, then text ads are for you.
I generally recommend them to About 15% of advertisers, but
certainly I think they're worth anyone's time just for the branding
aspect.
23:08
Okay, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into the
sponsored messaging ad formats right after this.
23:13
The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com.
The LinkedIn Ads experts.
23:23
B2Linked is the LinkedIn ads focused agency. We manage many of
LinkedIn's largest accounts worldwide, and we are official LinkedIn
partners, do contact us on B2Linkedin.com to get in touch, and our
team can help you enact these and other strategies to help you get
the very best of the best performance.
23:42
All right, let's jump now into sponsored messaging. There are now
two different flavors of sponsored messaging. So we'll go through
both. But we'll start out with just the basics about the entire
category. I want you to think of this like it's a cold email. And
rather than the other ad formats we've talked about, so far, where
you're only paying when someone clicks, these, you actually pay per
send. So you're going to pay on average 20 to 60 cents. And that's
in North America, that's about what we pay. And you send these to
someone with no guarantee that they will see it or open it, or
click on your call to action. So this ends up being actually the
most expensive ad format, and making it also the riskiest. Here's
how the math works out and how you should think about these. So
you're going to pay 20 to 60 cents per person you send it to, on
average about 50% will open. And then on average, about 3% to 4% of
people of those who open it will end up clicking on your call to
action. So when you look at your actual cost per click here, you're
going to end up in the $10 to $40 range, which is insane, and
that's all based off of the averages. So of course if you're going
to be running these, you don't want to be average, you want to get
a higher than a 50% open rate, and then a significantly higher
click through rate. If you can do that, you can end up getting cost
per click significantly lower than where you could with sponsored
content. But it takes a very special kind of offer to make this
work. When I say a special offer, I mean, it has to feel like a
personal invitation. If you have an offer, like hey, because of who
you are in the industry, we want to give you early access or a
sneak peek at something that we're building or it's something in
your industry. That feels very special. It feels very VIP. Maybe
you want to invite someone as a VIP to a free event you're putting
on where there's going to be drinks and networking with their
peers. That also feels very special. Maybe even something like hey,
we're looking for people like you. Does this position look
interesting to you would you want to apply? Those are all great
examples of things that performed very well as a sponsored
messaging ad. The rule that I run every one of my message ads
through is I asked myself if I would be excited about getting this
as a cold email from someone, or if I would mark it as spam.
Because if you would mark it as spam, you know, this would be the
most expensive way you could advertise on LinkedIn. But if a cold
email to you, you'd be excited about the opportunity, then you know
that this is going to land super well as an ad. We mentioned before
that these can be attached to lead gen forms, which really helps
conversion rates. And because these feel very personal because
there is some dynamic insertion you can do. You can insert
someone's first name, last name, title, company, industry, this
will feel very personal to them. It'll feel like someone is
actually reaching out to them and feel a little bit special. So
when you get leads here, they are generally of a much higher
quality, which is great. Be aware though, when you are evaluating
your performance here, realize that LinkedIn is not truthful in the
metrics that they show you. Now I know that's a bold accusation.
But let me explain. on all of the other ad formats, you only have
two layers, you have an impression goes to a click, and then a
click goes to a conversion. But with sponsored messaging ads, you
effectively have one extra step in between. So LinkedIn added the
opens, but when they started calculating click through rate, the
same way that they always have, click through rate, as they say, it
is actually just your open rate. So people look at this and go, Oh,
wow, I have a 40 cent cost per click here. That sounds insane. And
it really is because if you calculate it out, you're probably only
going to have a three to a 4% click through rate. And so your
metrics there about what your cost per click are, if you're just
looking at the dashboard are definitely going to be lying to you.
So if you are running any sort of sponsored messaging, I would
encourage you go and manually calculate it. Go and look at your
cost for how much you've sent. And then just divided by the number
of actual clicks you've received on your offer. And that will tell
you what your actual cost per click is. And certainly, if I had a
cost per click that was 20 30%, higher on sponsored messaging, then
I would be happy to pay that, because the lead quality is generally
much better. And these are so good at delivering rapidly if you're
trying to get the word out about something. This is a great way of
pushing it out to people. So you're not just waiting for you're
putting something in the feed and waiting for people to click and
come to you.
28:30
When you use these, you do get a free banner ad. And not everyone
takes them up on this, but realize that if you don't upload a 300
by 250 banner ad to be used on just your desktop visitors, it's
just a waste because one of your competitors could pop up instead.
So it's certainly worth going to your designer and having them kick
out an extra banner image for you.
28:52
Okay, so let's go down to the actual flavors of what sponsored
messaging commands. The very first one, the original is called
Message ads, it used to be called sponsored in mail. Now, I only
recommend these to about 5% of advertisers simply because you
really only get one shot with someone, you send them out this
message. And if they don't click on it, they're gone. And in order
for someone to actually want to click on it, it really does have to
be this special kind of offer that makes them feel like a VIP makes
them feel very valued. This will appear in your messaging. So in
your LinkedIn in mail, you get a subject line that people see
first, up to 60 characters, and then you get text in the message
itself up to 1500 characters. Now, if your subject line is good,
you'll see your open rate be higher than 50%. So try to get it up
in the %60, 70% is, I think 76% the highest I've ever seen. And
then your text, even if you're allowed 1500 characters, I would
recommend still shooting for less. People don't want to read a wall
of text. And so start by teasing them. Don't give them everything.
up front. Otherwise, they'll just see a wall of text and start to
ignore you. But if that text is effective, you should see a click
through rate higher than 4%. So watch for that. All of the other ad
formats are relatively quick to create, we will end up designing
all of our ads in Excel. So we have very quick copy and paste to
create ads. But any sort of sponsored messaging is a lot more
involved. It takes us about two or more minutes per ad to create a
message ad, whereas it's probably going to end up taking us less
than one minute to create sponsored content of any kind, and
certainly texts that are super quick. There's also no retargeting
here yet for message ads, so if someone doesn't make it to your
landing page, they're kind of just gone to you. Now when engagement
retargeting comes out in October, I'm really hopeful that they will
have retargeting here where you could say something like if someone
opened my message ad but didn't click, then I want to send them
another one. Because these are like a cold email, they work really
well to warm audiences because it's not cold anymore. It's now
warm. But then I think about it like this. If I already have their
email address, then why wouldn't I just email them for free? Why
would I pay LinkedIn 20 to 60 cents to send it, but these can be
really good for that.
31:23
But the newest variation that LinkedIn just barely came out with I
mentioned a couple episodes ago in the news section. These are
called conversation ads. They are Lincoln's newest ad format, and
one that I'm truly excited about. I told you that I only recommend
message ads to about 5% of advertisers because you have to have
this special offer. But your conversation ads are essentially a
chat bot experience. So you'll send this to someone and you'll give
them some options. And let's say you were asking someone if they
were going to be at an event because maybe you're going to be at
that event and you'd like to meet them at your booth to talk. You
might start off the conversation by saying, "Hey, are you going to
be at this event?" And if they respond, no, they're not just gone
like they would be with message ads. You can follow up and say,
"Oh, well, sorry, you're not going to be there to meet us. But hey,
how about do you want to join this webinar we're doing next week to
talk about something that we're going to be talking about at the
conference anyway, and you won't miss out on the great conference
stuff". So because you get more shots on goal here, you're not just
wasting it with one message that people aren't especially
interested in. Now you can test different messages. And what we
found we were actually part of the pilot here, and we have a case
study with our clients on the initial release of conversation ads.
We found that these have a 30% higher conversion rate than message
ads did. So that means that 30% of the traffic that would have just
seen the message and bounced, ended up converting, which is
amazing. So because it's 30% more effective, it means I can end up
recommending these a lot more often. So I find myself recommending
conversation adds about 10% of advertisers, as opposed to the 5%
from message ads. I think with these being just more versatile than
message ads, and really giving us more shots on goal, I think these
will very quickly become the most used sponsored messaging ad
format. The big downside to you who's creating it, though, these
are even more involved than message ads. I told you that it takes
us about two minutes per message ad to create one with conversation
ads, it takes us 20 plus minutes to create each ad.
33:46
There's no bulk creation, there's not very many shortcuts. So it's
it's very difficult to do these, but knowing that they perform 30%
better is enough for me to say it's worth our time in creating.
Your initial message. be up to 500 characters. And you can, at
least as far as we can tell, you can ask unlimited questions. And
you do get to put unique links in for every answer. So if you're
really insane about your UTM tracking parameters like we are, every
single answer, every single question, can have a unique tracking
link so you can really pay attention to what's working and what's
not.
34:24
Alright, now let's move on to dynamic ads. Now, you might know
dynamic ads as being LinkedIns creepiest ad format, because they
stick your picture into them. That's, of course joking. I've heard
a few people say that that's creepy. But I think most people
understand that a company is not actually sticking your face in
their ad. This is done by LinkedIn dynamically. These are shared
inventory with text ads. So they are only available on desktop and
they're over in the right rail, because they're essentially
combining what was three different text ads, they tend to have a
click through rate. That's six nificantly higher than text ads, but
will still look significantly lower than your sponsored content. I
recommend these to about 10% of advertisers. I used to recommend
these zero percent because they used to be insanely expensive. They
were usually twice the price of sponsored content, and their click
through rates were low like text ads. But just recently, LinkedIn
had a price reduction on these when they took all of the inventory
back from their programmatic ads, and dynamic ads was the
beneficiary of that reduction and got all of the ad inventory. So
because of that cost per click came down significantly. And now I
recommend these a lot more because you can pay between six to $8
per click on these, whereas they used to be in the 15 to $18 range.
This is the best ad format that you can use to get people to follow
your company page. It's a native ad format that's just asking "Hey,
we want you to follow our company page". These started out life as
an ad format just for talent solutions, the the talent side of the
business. And then LinkedIn Marketing Solutions ended up taking it
because it was already developed, and it was worth a shot. These do
work very well for hiring, you've probably seen the ads that are
like picture yourself at IBM. You get a 70 character description,
and then a 50 character headline down below, and a 100 by 100 pixel
image. These come in three different flavors. One's called
spotlight ads, which funny name, but it just means that it links to
your website. So if you want to send someone to an external landing
page, that's on your website, you'll want to select spotlight ads.
And for these, you'll get an optional 300 by 250 pixel background
image. So you can customize these a little bit to maybe feel more
like your brand. You can also dynamically insert their first name,
their job title, and even their company name as variables.
37:05
Then, like I mentioned, there is a follower ad. And this is just to
follow the company page. And it is the most efficient way to get
more company page followers as you're paying for them. This is so
much better after the price reduction, because now you can actually
get your cost per follower down into a really palatable range. You
can dynamically insert someone's first name and company name into
this. The third variation is called job ads. And I don't have a
whole lot to say here except they exist. And that's because I've
never used them for a job ad purpose. I would much rather use
sponsored content and text ad formats to get people for a position.
So I haven't ever used these, I'm assuming very similar performance
to the others. Okay, I've got all of the episode resources for you
coming right up. So stick around
38:01
Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show.
38:04
Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.
38:11
Okay, we're gonna go over all of the episode resources. So down in
the show notes, you'll find that article we talked about at the
beginning about the cities that because of COVID, their hiring
either did okay, or it totally tanked. So that'll be interesting to
watch. But you'll also notice links to all of the different ad
specs around each of the ad formats. So check and see a link to
video ad specs, carousel ad specs, single image ads, text ads,
message ads, conversation ads, and dynamic ads. So whichever of
these you want to start creating, go ahead and check out the specs
to make sure that you've got all of the assets you need to tackle
them. There's also a link to our LinkedIn Course that we did with
LinkedIn Learning. You'll definitely want to check that out. It's
very inexpensive and a great walkthrough and introduction In the
world of LinkedIn Ads. And of course, I would implore you on
whichever podcast player you are listening, please hit that
subscribe button so you can hear more of this awesome deep LinkedIn
ads content, if I don't say so myself. And then of course, if
you're liking what you're hearing, please do rate and review. It
makes a big difference because we're on Episode 12. This is very
early on in the journey and certainly anyone who's interested in
LinkedIn Ads, I hope they are listening to this. So please help
share it with them. drop us an email at Podcast@B2Linked.com with
any ideas for episodes, any questions based off of what you've
heard, and we will see you back here next week. We're cheering you
on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.