May 12, 2020
Show resources:
LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course
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Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.
Transcript:
How are your LinkedIn Ads performing? Good? Bad? How do you know? It's benchmarking time.
Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.
0:20
Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! I get asked all the time from
advertisers if they're doing well or not. And imagine that people
wanting to know if their efforts are paying off. So today we're
diving into all the benchmarks so you can know how your efforts are
stacking up. We'll cover the ad format averages, as well as what
you should be paying and seeing with engagement and your conversion
rates as well. Also, if you want to share this topic with someone
who doesn't listen to podcasts, check out the video in the show
notes that I did with Social Media Examiner. Okay, let's hit
it.
0:53
In the news, the most interesting thing that I've heard is that
LinkedIn Learning has seen a 3x in people taking their courses. And
so this is recorded in COVID isolation right now, which was so
interesting to see that people are taking advantage of the time
when they're home alone, and maybe even laid off from work, and
they're using this time to better themselves and improve. I thought
that was great. That's one of those feel good statistics. I wanted
to share a few of the reviews that you guys have left in your
podcast players or on the podcast network. So Leonardo Bellini says
"Ichiba, it means number one in Japanese. I think AJ is a fantastic
trainer about LinkedIn Ads. Nobody knows LinkedIn Ads better than
this guy". Oh, that is so awesome. Leonardo, I know him, he's from
Italy. So Leonardo, shout out to you. Thanks so much for leaving
such a kind review. Someone with the username Wolf STGT from
Germany says excellent, valid information and hands on tips, keep
rocking. Oh, thanks so much, Wolf. I appreciate that. Then there's
Billy Boy UK in Great Britain says "great as always, consistently
great, useful info from AJ". So thank you so much. And absolutely
to anyone else listening, I want to feature you. So leave a review.
Even if you don't rate me all the way up. I'd still love to feature
you. So shout it out, put it on whatever podcast player you're
going for. And I'm dying to hear your feedback on the show.
2:23
Okay, so now as we get into the benchmarking, first of all,
LinkedIn does not publish their information about benchmarks, about
averages. So it's really hard to actually tell if you're doing well
or not. So if LinkedIn is not publishing this, that means someone
else has to. Someone has to work from their limited data set. Well,
we've managed hundreds of LinkedIn Ads accounts across every ad
format, and about every industry that we can think through. So
certainly 400 accounts as compared to the 10s of thousands that
LinkedIn has. It's a small data sample size, but what we find is
our benchmarks that we've found from our own clients. All of the
accounts we've managed, overseen, even consulted on tend to be
pretty accurate. So I wanted to share those with you, even if they
are not a 100% representative. And I do wish that LinkedIn would
publish their benchmarks, I would be happy if they came and smashed
all of our data apart and proved it wrong. Since their data set is
100% complete, I would much rather be accurate than praised. So our
limited data set seems to be more complete than anything we've seen
out there. So I'm eager to share and a note on just the importance
of benchmarking. If you don't know how you're doing, you won't be
able to improve. And my biggest fear is that marketers who aren't
in the know could be blindsided. There could be a situation where a
marketer is complacent, thinking everything's fine. And then the
account gets audited by someone where they point out a whole bunch
of flaws or inefficiencies, and it could make the marketer look
bad. So I think there's a need to gauge and be aware And be
educated about the best things that you can do for your account for
protection. So you can make sure that you don't get blindsided. It
protects your job protects your reputation. And I also think
because of that this is the most important episode for the show
that we've come out with yet.
4:17
The metrics we're going to be benchmarking are going to be things
like your click through rate, your cost per click, and your
conversion rate. Those tend to be the unifying metrics that we see.
Now, as we talk about each one of these, certainly each one
individually is not the end all be all. For instance, when we
report click through rate to clients, we constantly hear, okay,
that's great and everything how often people are clicking on our
ads, but that's not our goal. It doesn't tell us whether we're
doing a good job or not. And certainly that is the case. Click
through rate does not necessarily mean anything to our clients.
But, it does mean something to us because it has a profound effect
on the costs that you're going to get. If you're being smart on
LinkedIn where you're bidding by the click, your click through rate
really doesn't dictate much, because you're only paying when
someone clicks anyway. So as long as you're spending your budget,
everything should be fine. But when you're trying to improve when
you realize that getting a higher click through rate can
significantly lower your cost per click, then all of a sudden it
starts to matter a lot. And conversion rates, this one's really
important. But, certainly if you're not paying very much per click,
then even if you had a low conversion rate, you might still be
happy with your overall cost per conversion. Your conversion rate
will vary depending on the level of perceived friction, and the
level of perceived value in what you're asking someone to do. So if
you're asking a lot of someone or asking something big from a cold
audience, you're going to see a low conversion rate. And if you're
offering something with a lot of perceived value, and it's
perceived as being free, then you'll probably have a very high
conversion. rate. So we'll go over the types of things that affect
those. Like we talked about your cost per click will increase if
your click through rates are bad. But we know that your cost per
click is also going to be higher if you're going after extremely
small audiences, or more competitive audiences. So these very much
go hand in hand. If you have a low click through rate, you will be
punished with really high cost per click, I get asked a lot about
industry specific benchmarks and audience specific benchmarks. And
what we've found is these benchmarks that we've defined, really
don't change very much by industry, or really by audience. So if
you're worried about your specific industry or your specific
audience, don't worry, go ahead and take these benchmarks the same
way they should still be pretty indicative. One of my early
observations when I was using LinkedIn Ads was I had a campaign
targeting manager level, another targeting director level, another
targeting VP, and my last campaign targeting C level people. And in
my mind, I hypothesized, well, of course, I'm going to pay more per
click to reach the C level person than I would at the manager
level. And what was so interesting is their cost per click, we're
actually within about 30 cents of each other. And to add to the
complexity here, the cost per click of the C level was 30 cents
less than reaching the manager audience. So what this goes to show
is your cost per click really doesn't change very much across
personas, across industries. You're probably going to pay an
average right now of about $8 to $11 per click, regardless of who
it is. Now, this changes a little bit, because if you're going
after the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, yeah, you're probably
going to pay $15 or $20 per click. But in general, for audiences
that aren't super, super tight and super in demand, you'll pay
about the same Conversion rates and click through rates also tend
to be quite similar in the same way. We do find elevated costs when
we're trying to bid on enterprise sized companies. And that makes
sense. They're quite a bit more competitive. When evaluating ad
performance, I'm imagining two hurdles that our ads have to get
over. The first hurdle is when we put up an ad, we need someone to
click on it. And then once they've clicked on it, the second hurdle
is we need them to convert. And based off of the efficiency metrics
about how people are getting over the first and second hurdle, it
lets us know what needs to be improved specifically. So we'll go
over those efficiency metrics and how to actually audit your
account here in a little bit.
8:44
First off definitions. We're going to be talking about, click
through rates, which is the number of times people took action on
your ad out of the number of times that people saw them. This will
probably sound very elementary to many of you, but there's a reason
that I'm going over the definitions because it's going to be
important as we talk about sponsored messaging ads.
9:08
We're also going to be talking about conversion rates, which is the
number of conversions out of the number of times that people took
action and clicked on your ads. This usually is a form fill, but
sometimes people have different definitions for what a conversion
is. Okay, our two hurdles. So if you're having a hard time getting
people to click on your ads, you will know because your click
through rate will be low. And then if you're getting a lot of
clicks, but you're just not seeing the leads or conversions
happening, you'll know this because your conversion rate will be
low. So figure out which of those two hurdles you're stumbling
over. And then here at the end, we'll go over the actions that you
can actually take to fix and rectify these.
9:50
Let's go over how to actually check out your performance. So you're
logged into LinkedIn's campaign manager where you can see all of
your different campaigns or maybe you're even at the ad level, you
can see it there as well. Right above the list of campaigns, you'll
see an option for columns. And if it's already selected with
performance, then you're in a great place to see your click through
rate and your cost per click. If you want to view your conversion
rate, you have to select that columns and drop it down to where you
can see leads and conversions. It's difficult because we can't
customize the columns so we can see all of this on one page. So you
will need to toggle back and forth as you're analyzing. It's very
important for you to understand that when we talk about click
through rate and cost per click, those metrics will be meaningful
for every single type of ad, just as they're written in the ad
platform. Except if you're using sponsored messaging, if you're
using sponsored messaging, these metrics are lying to you, and
you'll have to figure out a different way. We'll go over all that.
But the reason why this is is because there's an extra step in the
advertising process, when you're using sponsored messaging ads. We
still have impressions, which is someone seeing the ad. But on
sponsored messaging ads, that's a send, that means it was sent to
someone, but not necessarily viewed. So we're departing from our
definitions a little bit. The first action someone can take is
opening it. And so LinkedIn calls an "open" a "click". And the
average open rate of a sponsored messaging ad is like 50%. So if
you're believing these metrics, as you're looking at them,
sponsored messaging ads look really good. They're gonna have a 50%
click through rate, looking at the dashboard. And your cost per
click is also going to look really low because half of the people
open it. LinkedIn is reporting to you that that's a click. So your
cost per click quote, unquote, is usually just about twice the cost
of your cost per send. So these look really good if you don't know
the metrics you're looking at. You'll look at it going, "wow, we're
paying less than $1 per click, and our click through rate is 50%".
That's incredible. So keep in mind, these are definitely lying to
you, the real click that you want to care about is in a different
column. So we'll come to that as we covered sponsored messaging
specifically.
12:19
But as of right now, let's talk a little bit about conversion
rates, because these are quite a bit more unified. So there are two
different types of conversions that we can have on LinkedIn Ads. If
you are sending someone to a landing page that you own, there are a
few steps. And the conversions that occur here are going to be
called conversions in the ad platform. In order to get these
conversions reporting, it takes four different steps. So the first
is you have to take your insight tag, which is this little piece of
tracking JavaScript from your account and install it on at least
your homepage, your landing page, and your thank you page. Ideally,
you have this on every page of the website, but just minimum of
those three so that it will function. Next is you have to go into
account assets and conversions, and actually set this conversion
up. You have to tell LinkedIn, when someone lands on page x, that's
called a conversion. And you let them know anytime this tag fires
on that page, then yes, you now have a conversion. But it's not
enough just to have it set up. Now you have to go and actually
associate that conversion to the campaigns you're running. You can
do that as you're setting up the conversion and just check every
campaign in the account. Or you can go into your campaign settings
and right at the very bottom of that campaign, you'll see an option
to install conversion tracking. There are two different ways that
you can track your conversions. You can either have someone land on
a thank you page, so they fill out the form, you then redirect them
to a separate page that says something like, thanks for giving us
your info, we'll be in touch soon. Or here's a link to download
that PDF that we were telling you about. And this is by far the
easiest way to track your conversions. When you tell your webmaster
that you need a separate URL thank you page, they're probably going
to look at you like you were making a request from the 80s. This is
a very old school way of doing it. But it is by far the best, it's
the most reliable, and it's the most simple. Even without any
coding knowledge, I can still troubleshoot issues on a thank you
page. The other way though, is through an event tracking pixel. And
this takes some pretty advanced understanding of JavaScript in
order to do so as soon as we get into event tracking issues. I'm
out I have to get our web developer involved. But this involves
going on usually a button and then you set an event where as soon
as someone clicks on the button to submit the form, then that's
going to fire a piece of code back to LinkedIn. And they'll call
that a conversion. Your web developer will understand this very
well. But if it's you, as a marketer trying to set this up, you
will likely do very, very well to just send it to a separate thank
you page, because this event tracking solution is much more
technical. Okay, so let's say you have this set up and you're
driving conversions. If you go and look at LinkedIn's conversions
column, that number is going to be wrong. It's going to be lying to
you a little bit. The conversions column, which is the default
column, that everything on LinkedIn uses, is actually a combination
of two different things. There's something called click
conversions, which is what we care about. And then there's also
something called view through conversions. Now, a view through
conversion feels like a lie to me, because all a view through
conversion is is one of your ads had to show up as an impression to
someone, and then they ended up converting because of a different
channel. So I'll outline this for a situation that could have
occurred. So a LinkedIn member is scrolling through their newsfeed,
they scroll very quickly past an ad, they don't even see it. They
don't even acknowledge it. And then they end up looking for a
solution on Google, they click one of the PPC ads on Google end up
converting. And now LinkedIn is going to report that as a
conversion inside of LinkedIn ads. So if you are comfortable with
slightly over reporting on the platform, then yeah, go ahead and
use the conversions column. But we only report based off of click
conversions, because that sure seems a lot more honest. Now there
is a different kind of conversion altogether on LinkedIn. And that
is when you're using lead generation forms. So one of the next
episodes is all going to be about lead generation form ads. So
stick around for that one.
12:19
But let's talk about what type of conversion you'll see come
through. When you are running lead gen form ads, the native forms
right within your ads, you won't see any metrics show up in the
conversions columns, but there will be a column for leads. And
there's also another column for lead form opens. The nice thing
about lead generation forms is you don't actually have to set up
anything for this. Because the conversion occurs on LinkedIn and
LinkedIn understands it. They will just do all of the conversion
tracking for you. There's no setting up pixels, there's no really
anything you could do wrong to screw it up. Of course, the hard
part with lead generation forms is you have to figure out how to
get those leads out of LinkedIn by using an integration
partner.
17:44
Okay, let's talk specifically about each ad format and what you can
expect benchmarking wise. So starting with sponsored content, which
is by far my favorite ad format, this encapsulates single image ads
as well as carousel as well as video ads. The click through rate
that we normally see, and LinkedIn actually even shares this
information if you ask your rep. They see about a .4% click through
rate on average. When we launch ads, according to our own
conventions and strategies, we generally average between .8 and
1.2. So it's not difficult to outperform the average. But as long
as you're over .4%, you're at least beating the average. If you're
underperforming there, absolutely we'll talk about the things you
can change. For costs per click, we expect sponsored content to
land anywhere between about $8 to $11. If you're paying under that
you're doing fantastic. If you're paying over about $11 a click,
unless you are targeting a super small audience, or a really,
really important enterprise level, like account based marketing
list, you're probably bidding too high or bidding incorrectly. Then
we get to the issue of conversion rates. I abbreviate this CVR.
There's a little bit of a departure here based on what you're
asking someone to do. So I split this into low friction offers and
high friction offers. Low friction offers would be an example of
like, here's a free piece of content that's really valuable, really
interesting to you. And in exchange, all we're asking for is your
contact info. If you're offering a low friction offer like that, we
usually see between about 10 to 15% conversion rate, and anything
over 15%, we call rockstar content and we want to go all in on that
and generate as many conversions as we can while it's hot. But then
you have high friction offers, like, hey, talk to our sales rep or
buy something or take a demo or try a free trial of something. This
is where of a cold audience, you're asking too much too soon. And
because of that, people aren't going to be willing, or at least not
as many people are going to be willing to take that actyion. So
they'll click because they're interested or curious, but they will
only convert between about 1.5% to 4%. Mostly on the lower end of
that though, unless you're a big brand.
20:12
Okay, onto sponsored messaging. This includes both message ads,
which used to be called sponsored in mail, and the new conversation
ads. Like we talked about before, we have to add an extra metric in
here. So we're going to talk about open rate. LinkedIn will call
this click through rate, but that is absolutely not accurate. The
average open rate is probably going to be about 50%. So if you have
a 60% or a 70%, open rate, you know your subject line is rocking
it. But then once someone opens, the next thing that you're going
to want them to do is actually take action on something and click
internally. Now click through rates are only between about three to
4% on average, and so if you have 7, 8, 9%, you have an amazing
offer with great copy. If you do the math here with a 50%, open
rate, a 3 to 4% click through rate and you're probably going to end
up paying on a cost per send basis, anywhere between about 20 cents
and 70 cents depending on how competitive that audiences. Your
average cost per click is going to land somewhere between about $23
to $56. Now that is cost per click, remember I just told you that
sponsored content, you'll average between $8 to $11. So what is
sponsored messaging doing for you that it would be worth three to
eight times as much. So yes, sponsored messaging is on average, the
most expensive ad format on LinkedIn and because of that, you need
to be really careful and really strategic about how you approach
it. Since the costs are so high on average, we don't even recommend
it to our average client. We only even suggest it to our clients
when we think we can get 70% open rates, and 7% click through
rates. That requires a very special type of offer. And certainly
not everyone has it, it has to be a very personal type of offer.
But if you can get this 70%, open rates and 7% click through rates,
that will get your overall cost per click somewhere between about
$4 and $14, depending on how much you paid. If your audience is
uncompetitive, and you're paying 20 cents per send, it's around the
$4 mark per click, which is great. That's half of what we would pay
using sponsored content. But if you're paying 70 cents on the high
side, then that turns out to be about a $14 cost per click. And if
you want any more information on these ad formats, check out
Episode 13 where we went really deep into those. Okay, here's a
quick sponsor break and then we'll dive into the rest of the ad
formats coming right up.
22:56
The LinkedIn Ads show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com,
the LinkedIn Ads experts.
23:05
If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you be too
linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We manage LinkedIn's
largest accounts and we're the only media buying agency to be
official LinkedIn partners. And performance to your goals is our
only priority. Fill out the contact form on any page of
B2Linked.com to get in touch and we'd absolutely love to help you
demolish your goals.
23:29
Okay, let's jump into the other ad formats. So next coming up is
text ads. Now most people who run text ads think that they're doing
a bad job because the metrics look really bad, especially click
through rate, but these are a hard ad to over perform or even
underperform. So the average click through rate on these is .025%.
So that's two and a half clicks out of every 10,000 impressions.
Because these are only shown on desktop, and they're in the right
rail, and they obviously look like ads, most people tend to be
pretty banner blind to them, they ignore them. So if you have a
click through rate over about .03%, you're doing amazing. Your ads
are rock star level, keep it up. And this is LinkedIn's cheapest ad
format. You can bid all the way to the floor of $2 if you want, but
most of the time we see people paying between about $3 to $5 per
click. So significantly cheaper than even sponsored content. But
it's also really hard to drive a lot of this traffic unless you
have a massive audience. If you're bidding higher, yeah, you can
pay all the way up into like the $13 to $15 a click for these, but
I probably wouldn't suggest it. You're really burning dollars at
that point.
24:51
Okay, and then conversion rate. This totally depends on the offer.
If you have a low friction or a high friction offer your conversion
rate is going to vary significantly. But what we find is text ads
because they come from people who are on a desktop, they have a
full use of the keyboard, you can generally get higher quality
leads here, you can generally get a slightly higher conversion
rate, because they don't feel as bad about typing more fields that
they might feel bad about on a mobile device, doing lots of thumb
typing. And you can usually get them to fill out more fields. So
text ads conversions we love. Then you've got dynamic ads. Now one
ad unit of dynamic ads takes up the space of three text ads.
Because of that, you'll see click through rates that are equal to
about three times the average click through rate of text ads. So if
you're performing over a .06 percent click through rate, you're
doing great. We oftentimes see .08, .09, even as high as .1 in some
cases. Now your cost per click here, it used to be that you'd pay
$13 to $18 per click on these, but LinkedIn had a recent price
reduction, like we've talked about in Episode 13. And because of
that, the cost per click now is usually between about $6 to $8 per
click. Because the click through rate is low like text ads. Again,
this is an ad format that's really hard to get a lot of traffic
from. So fight the temptation to bid so high that you're paying
over about the $8 mark, because you can probably pay $8 per click
on sponsored content and capture a lot more traffic. Just like text
ads, your conversion rate on dynamic ads totally depends on the
perceived value and the perceived friction of that offer. Okay, so
you're saying to yourself, I found some areas, identified some
metrics that are not as good as they should be. So if my
performance sucks, how do I go and fix it? Let's focus first on
your click through rate. So if your click through rate is below the
benchmarks that I've laid out here, it's probably one of four
things. The first is maybe your ad copy isn't showing the value of
your offer properly. Number two is maybe your image is not contrast
enough to get people to stop scrolling. Remember, your images job
is just to be a thumb stopper. Don't try to convert someone from
the image. That's the job of your ad copy. So on to the point three
here, your ad copy might not be pressing on your pain point hard
enough. You might be saying, here's what you can get, but maybe
you're not telling them, "hey, you have a problem. This is going to
solve it". And your fourth is, and this is usually my last resort,
it could be that your offer simply isn't interesting. And there's
no amount of ad copy rewriting you can do to make your offer seem
interesting enough to get over that first hurdle, which is getting
someone to click. So if you're under these, click through rate
benchmarks, try refreshing your ad copy, try saying it in a
different way, try selling that offer a little bit better and see
if you can get that up. We'll get you sailing over hurdle number
one, and then getting towards hurdle number two. Okay, but what if
you're paying too much? What if your costs per click are
significantly higher than what I've laid out here? If you go back
to Episode 6 where we talked about bidding and budgeting, the first
reason the biggest reason why people are paying too much, it's
because they're bidding too high, or they're bidding wrong. So
don't take LinkedIn's advice on how to bid here, definitely use the
strategy I laid out in Episode 6. The next reason why you might be
paying so much though, is maybe you have bad click through rates,
which we just went over. So improve those things. If you can get
your click through rate higher, your cost per click will come down.
The third reason your cost per click might be too high is really
something you can't do very much about and it's if competition is
just so high. If you're in an area where competition is ridiculous,
and you're paying like $13, $15 a click and you just can't get
traffic at less than that, what you'll want to do is play with
different offers and play with different ad creative. Because if
you can get your click through rate up significantly, that will get
your cost per click down. And all you have to do is outperform your
competitors in the auction by getting a higher click through rate,
awarding you a higher relevancy score, and then LinkedIn will let
you start getting traffic at lower bids.
29:26
Okay, and finally, conversion rate, this is the second hurdle. So
you're getting a lot of traffic, you're getting people clicking,
but you're not seeing a lot of conversions. There are lots of
things that can affect your conversion rate. Let's go through each
of those. Very first off, most of the time, it's your offer. If
you're telling someone give us your personal information. If
someone's going to be willing to give you that information, that
better be good, it better be worth their time and potentially
opening themselves up to getting spam. So don't try to give them a
product brochure. Don't try to offer them something like a white
paper from eight years ago. It has to be interpreted as valuable,
otherwise they're not going to convert. Okay, so assuming you have
an offer that people actually would care about that is exciting is
perceived as valuable. If you're still not converting, maybe it's
because your ad didn't prep them well enough when they got to that
form. So if the ad is telling them, here's the pain point, here's
the value that you're going to get by moving forward here. And then
they get to the landing page. It could be that your ad didn't prep
them well enough to convert. So maybe the landing page itself is
saying fill out this form, and we'll give you this but maybe the ad
didn't tell them that there was going to be a form on the other
side. Maybe the ad didn't give them a call to action. It just said,
"hey, you've got this problem, click here to solve it". And then
when they get to the page, they're disappointed because it's asking
for their information and it feels like a bait and switch to them.
Then there are lots of things about the landing page that could be
wrong here. So maybe your landing page doesn't instill trust. You
could have all of the right stuff on your landing page, it could
look good, but if for some reason someone is looking at it going,
oh, I've never heard of this company before, this could be shady,
you could have all the right elements, but your conversion rate
would be next to nothing and you wouldn't know why. So make sure
you concentrate on those trust signals. Put badges and here are the
customers we've worked with. And here's where we've been featured.
That type of information will help instill that trust and get
people to move forward. Sometimes the landing page doesn't have all
the right stuff, and maybe it's hindering your conversion. Imagine
what happens when someone goes to click on your ad. And then your
page takes three, four or five seconds to come up and load. You're
not sticking around and neither is your prospect. So sometimes here
it's a page load speed issue. So make sure your landing pages are
loading fast. So you don't lose people before they even get there.
Maybe your form comes first, but you didn't actually sell the offer
well enough. There's no text telling them here's the value, here's
the benefit to you. So make sure that you lead with the value. By
reading this PDF, you will learn X, Y, and Z, you will be able to
do A. The three things that we really want to see on a landing
page. Number one, we want the form to be front and center. So as
soon as the page loads, people are in the mindset, you're going to
be asking something of me and I'm in that mindset. Number two, you
want the text telling them here's the value, here's the benefits to
you. Third, you want these trust signals. You want something
telling them instilling that trust. And if you have all three of
those things, but you're still not converting, chances are you're
asking too much. Your offer isn't actually valuable, which hurts to
hear, but maybe you are just not providing as much value as you
thought you were. Or maybe the offer is pretty good. But your
landing page is asking for too much stuff. If you're asking for
more than like four, maybe five fields, people are going to look at
that. And even if they are interested, they're going to say,
they're asking for my social security number and a license to my
firstborn. I, this just isn't worth it, and they'll leave. So try
to keep your form fields down to preferably first name, last name,
email converts the highest, you may have to ask for phone number.
So one cool little hack here is, as of recently, LinkedIn allowed
the lead gen form ads to pass someone's profile URL from a field.
And what's so cool about this is if you have access to their
profile URL, you don't need to ask them things like what their job
title is, or what company they work for, or what industry they're
in, or what their company size is. You don't have to ask that
because It's all available on their public LinkedIn profile. So as
my little hack here, if I'm using lead gen forms, I will ask for
first name, last name, email, and profile URL. People tend to
convert nicely on this because you asked them for a profile URL and
they say, well, it's public knowledge Anyway, why do I care, but it
has all of the other information that you want to extract and your
sales team is going to appreciate a very quick way to look them up
and see how to approach them. So your job now, I want you to go
take a look at all of your different ad formats and their
performance, compare them to the benchmarks, and then figure out
are you having trouble over hurdle one, two, maybe even both, or
maybe you're looking at this going oh, I'm having trouble over no
hurdles. And that's great. I hope that you are just killing it and
slaying it. But, if you are stumbling over one of those hurdles, I
do hope this information has been super helpful for you. I do want
to add just one little thing based off of the conversion rate
factors. There is a cool way that you can actually test your
landing pages to see if your landing page is hindering the
conversion or if it's the offer. So if I'm running traffic to a
landing page, and I'm having a low conversion rate, but I feel like
my offers good, what I will do is run exactly the same ad to the
exact same audience. But instead, I'm going to test it through a
lead generation form. And the difference here is that a lead gen
form is filled out right on LinkedIn, where all the trust signals
are already there, and the speed is there. So if you're seeing a 2%
conversion rate from your landing page, but you see a 15%
conversion rate from your lead gen forms for exactly the same
thing, that is a screaming signal that wow, your landing page is
hindering conversions and you need to fix that landing page,
whether it's speed, whether it's the right elements, whether it's
selling the asset better on it, something's wrong with that landing
page. But, if you do this test, and maybe you had a 2% conversion
rate on the landing page, but a 5% conversion rate from your lead
gen form, then you know it's probably the offer. People just aren't
willing to download what it is that you're offering them. So that's
time to do some more work on the offer. Okay, with that being said,
I've got all the episode resources for you coming right up, so
stick around.
36:26
Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads show. Hungry for more?
AJ Wilcox, take it away.
36:36
Okay, I mentioned at the beginning about the benchmarks video that
I did with Social Media Examiner. It's on YouTube so hit that link
in your show notes. This is an 11 minute video that goes over a
very condensed version of what we've talked about here. So if
someone is not a podcast listener, but you need them to understand
benchmarks, send them that video. They'll watch it and go, "oh,
great. You're right. We should change our landing page" or whatever
you're trying to get them to do. Use that as a tool to help
convince. The next is when I present on LinkedIn Ads, I have a
slide all about benchmarks. And so I'm going to put that as a JPEG
that you can just click on and download it, you can use this as an
easy reference. Just print it off, put it up in your office, or I
don't know, make it your desktop background or something. But this
will help you have a reference guide. So you don't have to go back
and listen to this and take notes. If you are new, or if you have
an employee who is new to LinkedIn Ads, have them check out the
course link. This is the LinkedIn Learning course that I did with
LinkedIn Learning. And it covers about the first hour and a half of
what I train, when teams bring me in. I charge $500 an hour for
consulting. And this course is only $25 if you have to buy it, or
if you have LinkedIn premium of any kind, you'll have access to it
for free. So a very, very good deal for anyone who wants to learn
more about LinkedIn Ads. It takes you from absolutely nothing to
all the basics. Open up your podcast player right now and hit the
subscribe button whichever podcast player you're using, I want you
to subscribe. I hope I've provided enough value that you'll want to
keep listening. I have so many cool plans for episodes coming up.
So I want you to be ready for those. And then please, if you do
like what you're listening to, please hit a review, give it a
rating and leave us a review. I'd love to shout you out in the
review segment. And then finally, if you have any ideas for what
you would like us to cover here on the podcast, or if you have
questions, feel free to reach out to Podcast@B2Linked.com and we
will help you out as fast as possible. Okay, see you back here next
week. And we are cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads
initiatives.