Jun 30, 2020
Show Resources:
LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course
Engagement Retargeting Announcement
What should you offer from your LinkedIn Ads? - The LinkedIn Ads Show Episode 10
A Guide to LinkedIn Ads Targeting Options - The LinkedIn Ads Show Episode 11
Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.
Show Transcript:
You've been testing LinkedIn Ads and results look great. And now you want to scale up. Here's your playbook for scaling efficiently.
Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.
0:21
Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. I once had a boss who said that
you can scale up, or you can optimize costs down, but you can't do
both. Thank goodness, he was dead wrong. We're going to show you
how you can scale and keep slash improve your efficiency. Okay,
into the news section. I just realized that I haven't covered the
release of engagement retargeting in the news. I blabbed about it
on LinkedIn, but I never even mentioned it on the podcast. If you
listen to Episode Three, where I was talking about roadmap, I let
you know this was coming out. And I also let you know that this is
the feature that I was most excited about. But then I didn't even
mention it in the news. Okay, so here's the story. When it was
announced on June 3 of 2020, about a quarter of users had it rolled
out and then it rolled out about a quarter every week. So by the
time you're listening to this podcast, everyone here should have
it. And what this is, it's the ability to retarget lead generation
form openers, and lead generation form submitters. We'll talk here
in a minute why this is monumental. It can also retarget video
viewers, anyone who watched at least two seconds, anyone who
watched 25% of it 50%, 75% and completion. And it's important to
understand this is both from an include and an exclude, meaning you
could create a funnel that's like, if you watched 75% of my video,
exclude those people from my original audience. And now I want a
retargeting audience that all it does is show ads to the people who
watched at least 75% and maybe I'm showing them the next one in the
sequence.
2:00
So of course, including is cool, but excluding to me is always
cooler. The other cool part about this is it there's a 100% match
rate. If you're on LinkedIn, LinkedIn knows who you are, and
they're tracking what content, what forms you're interacting with.
And so it's not like website retargeting where traffic hits your
landing page and you lose half of your audience because they don't
accept cookies. This is 100% of the people who open your form,
submit it, or watch any portion of your video end up becoming as
part of your retargeting audience. Super, super cool. I am ecstatic
about this. We really haven't done much with LinkedIn video ads,
because when we've compared effective cost per click, and effective
cost per conversion, video always tends to be, not always, in most
cases, LinkedIn ads video tends to be more expensive than static.
And so we've just said, well, without retargeting, why would we
care? Why don't we just launch static ads instead? Now that we have
retargeting. I'm gonna start recommending LinkedIn video ads quite
a bit more often. It's this level of control. It was one of the
table stakes that I needed before I could start actually
recommending it. And you'll see in the show notes, a link to the
announcement that I actually helped with on
searchenginejournal.com.
3:15
At the same time, they also announced the LinkedIn audience network
partners. Now in the future, we're going to have a whole episode
about LinkedIn audience network. And I get a lot of questions about
this. But what was so cool to me about the announcement here is for
the first time, LinkedIn actually shared some of the sites that are
off of LinkedIn that your ads can show up on. Now they have, as far
as I know, over 1000 of these sites that are super handpicked, they
are nuts about quality over there. They never want your ads showing
up on a Breitbart and ending up hurting your brand. But they've
never actually mentioned any partners. And quite frankly, I don't
really frequent the sites that the ads are showing up on so I
didn't really have much of an idea. Like I mentioned in the last
episode, I've been privy to some of these sites, just from private
conversations with LinkedIn product managers. But under NDA, I
wasn't allowed to share them. Okay, so now they gave us three
examples that I can share. They mentioned the Flipboard app, which
a lot of people consume news on tablets. They also mentioned
msn.com, and Microsoft news. And these make a lot of sense there,
Microsoft properties, tight control owned by Microsoft, yada, yada.
And then of course, they have a bunch of other hand picked ones
that they haven't announced yet. But the second, they're public,
I'm going to add them into the news section. So keep staying
subscribed. And if I can get real with you guys for a minute, just
some real talk here. I'm spending about four hours of prep and
researching on each episode. And that's what the whole team
supporting me with editing and publishing. Thank you, Matt and
Lindsey, I know you guys are listening. I'm also running
B2linked.com the whole agency and writing a book and I have four
kids and a lovely wife who all like it when I'm around. So I'm
having a tough time keeping up with the pace and I would love to
hear your feedback on these two things. And I don't want you
thinking, "oh, AJ doesn't want to hear for me". Absolutely. I'm
talking to you, I want your feedback on these things, because I
really can't, I can't make these decisions without your input.
Okay, So question number one, do we dwell too much on details? For
instance, would you be happy with it if I were just to say, and if
your click through rate is over 1% on sponsored content, that means
that it's a good time to switch to auto bidding, you'll end up
saving money. Instead of what I might normally say, which is,
here's the background on the differences between CPC bidding and
auto bidding. And here's why each bid level affects your campaigns
the way it does, etc, etc. Number two that I'd like your feedback
on is length. Right now I basically plan out a pretty in depth
topic and I talk for as long as it takes to cover the subject.
Sometimes it's as low as 30 minutes. Sometimes it's over an hour.
And I've heard feedback from some of you that people like 20 ish
minute podcasts, and this is a little bit foreign to me. Because I
personally really love long podcasts, but would you like them to be
shorter? Would you like them to be more specific in topic? So Email
us at Podcast@B2linked.com. You'll see that down in in the show
notes and let me know seriously i'd absolutely love to hear from
you on this because if you want less depth less details, if you
want shorter than honestly these would take me a lot less time to
create but you know, in depth is kind of my style if you haven't
gathered already, so please let me know.
6:31
Okay, highlighting reviews. Michelle Araiza writes "the ultimate
LinkedIn Ads podcast for the modern marketer". "AJ is the LinkedIn
Ads pioneer and breaks down the topics very well for beginners.
He's tested every LinkedIn Ads feature and honestly shares his
experience and best practices. This podcast is a marketers must for
staying relevant in digital marketing." Now, Michelle, I happen to
know she runs demandgen at an awesome San Francisco cloud tech
company. She's a stellar marketer in her own right, so Michelle,
thank you so much for the kind review. It's that much more
meaningful coming from you. And I do try really hard to honestly
share. Sometimes what I share is hot takes sometimes I know
LinkedIn doesn't actually appreciate my advice that I'm giving
people. But I feel really strongly that you guys deserve to
honestly know the things that the platform can't tell you. Yeah,
we've spent $135 million so far on LinkedIn ads, and we figured out
a lot of potholes because we've stepped in them. We found a lot of
cool hacks, things that worked unexpectedly, and that's what I'm
seeking to share with you. And so I hope that's really
appreciated.
7:35
Then alo marketing writes "love AJ!" "AJ podcasts are full of great
information that you can put into action. I have enjoyed all his
podcasts and look forward to listening to more." Alo marketing, I
checked them out their local agency in New Jersey and Alice I
stalked you on LinkedIn and just wanted to personally say thank you
for that awesome review. Then Michael A Manzur writes, "wow
powerful show with actionable practical tips". Now I know Michael,
he's a he's an incredible LinkedIn ads marketer in South Florida.
And he knows the South Florida market. He knows the Spanish
speaking and English speaking markets really well there. You're
going to be hearing a lot more from Michael, I'm sure soon. And I
want to feature you, so please leave your reviews on whatever
podcast player or service that you're using. I would love to hear
your feedback. And a little bit more real talk here. I feel like a
total douche reading reviews that praise me as like being amazing.
So do share whatever you want. I want honest reviews, and I will
read them word for word. But if you can make me sound a little bit
more humble, I'd turn less red while I'm reading them.
8:41
Okay, with that being said, let's hit it. We're gonna use an
example here of scale, saying that if you have a target audience of
10,000 people, which I'm using this for a nice round number. If
you've listened to other episodes, you may know that I really like
audiences between about 20,000 and 80,000 people in them, but nice
round number here of 10k. So you have an audience of 10,000, let's
say 1,000 of them are active on LinkedIn each day. So that's a big
assumption, but let's say about 10% of them are going to be on
LinkedIn at least once a day. And if you're having success, and you
want to scale, there are three levers that you can pull. Assuming
you can't impact how active your audience is on LinkedIn, that
would be the fourth lever, if you could turn that up. But the other
three levers that you can control, we're going to go through each
one in order of priority. Your first lever here for scaling up is
to increase your audience size. Now, there are two different ways
you could do that. You could either number one, target the same
persona in just new ways. So you've got the same target audience,
you're just finding different ways of targeting that same person,
and this is the preferable way. The other way is to actually expand
your audience to target more personas. So the lowest hanging fruit
here is to target the same persona, but just target them in
different ways. If you listen to Episode 11, on the in depth types
of targeting, you'll get more detail here. But basically, the way
that LinkedIn can put people into buckets for you, as an advertiser
to advertise to, is totally based off of how complete their profile
is, and how much they share. And so as you use different types of
targeting, you get access to potentially different people who still
really fit your ideal criteria. For instance, if you're targeting
just by job title, LinkedIn only understands about 30% of job
titles. And that means that you're only reaching about 30% of your
audience, which seems like a big opportunity if you're going man I
wish we had about I don't know the other 70% of our traffic,
10:44
then you might want to expand into something like job function with
seniority. And job function is your department, which is really
broad, but it is significantly cheaper on a cost per click basis
and can get you a ton more impressions more volume of clicks. So if
you can fit your audience nicely into a whole department with their
seniority, then that's a great one to use. We also really love
using groups a lot of times with seniority. Skills with seniority.
We like taking existing audiences and creating look alike audiences
from them. And that can help us reach new audiences and test them
in their own right. There's also account based marketing, if you
bring your specific list of companies. Now I realize you're
probably already targeting the same companies through your native
targeting. So this may not actually act as an expansion to your
campaigns. But who knows, maybe this is a new set of companies that
you're not reaching elsewhere, and this could be a good way to
expand. Also, when you're doing account based marketing, you don't
necessarily just need to go after the people who feel your pain. So
if you're selling a software, and an individual contributor is the
one who uses it. They're the ones who understand the value of
saving the time or the hassle or whatever you provide. If you're
targeting just by specific companies, you can be a little bit more
liberal, you can target the individual contributor, you can target
their manager, maybe even all the way up to the C suite. You can
target finance, who's probably going to be signing the contract.
You could if it's a small company, you could target the company
owner, who's probably going to be involved in that decision, too.
So if you're doing account based marketing, you can be a little bit
more broad about your roles in an effort to just give that buying
committee a big digital hug. If you have email lists from somewhere
else, especially if those emails are possibly not found within your
existing target audiences. You can scale by uploading lists. This
is a great way. And last episode, I think you can hear the like the
cringe in my voice. But this is a possibility, there is that
checkbox called audience expansion and in my mind, I'm going
nooooo, don't mention it. I usually say uncheck that. But really if
managing your LinkedIn ads campaigns is a huge pain for you,
because you're managing so many other channels and you just don't
have time to get strategic, then hitting that one checkbox can give
you access to new audience, even though it won't be efficient, it
won't be transparent, but it is a possibility.
13:16
Okay, so for an example here, our audience size of 10,000, maybe we
were targeting them by job title. And if we add on a skills plus
seniority version, now this new audience has 30,000 people in it.
And of course, there will be some overlap between your 10,000
campaign and your 30,000 campaign. And that's totally okay. You
don't get punished in any way for overlap. But even if there's 100%
overlap, you still tripled your audience reach and this will help
you expand. You may be thinking these are the same people, but
we're just targeting them differently. But my argument here is yes,
you are targeting theoretically the quote unquote same people it
but now we're doing it in different ways. And by doing This we are
making up for where LinkedIn doesn't have the profile data, maybe
they haven't filled out their profile all the way. And we can still
reach the right people. And by using this strategy, we've been able
to double or even triple our audience sizes, which is fantastic.
And this tells us that despite just using different targeting
methods, we're actually reaching new audience members as well.
Because if we've maxed out one type of targeting, and we add new on
and we can double or triple our level of spend, we know we're
reaching new people that we weren't reaching before. The other way
I mentioned of expanding your audiences is to target more personas,
you're expanding the roles that you're going after. So for
instance, if you're only going after individual contributors, if
the seniority called senior that LinkedIn lists, maybe it makes
sense to move upstream a little bit, so maybe you want to start
targeting manager seniority or director seniority, maybe those who
are decision makers, maybe they can engage in your product as well.
Same type of thing with company sizes. If you're focused
specifically on let's say company sizes 500 to 1,000. What if you
move down market a little bit? What if you did the 200 to 500, or
maybe even larger, you're going for 1000 to 5000. You can expand
that way, and really increase your audience size. If you're already
targeting specific industries, you can target more industries, or
even just remove the industry filter altogether and hit the
relevant roles in all industries. Maybe you can even target other
roles entirely within the companies. So if you're targeting just
engineers, for instance, just developers, maybe you can target like
IT managers or someone else, obviously, as long as they're
relevant. Okay, so the example here is maybe your 10,000 person
audience is mostly individual contributors. And then when you added
in manager seniority, it jumps up to 20,000. And so now you're
reaching 30,000 people which tripled your audience size. So as long
as this makes sense As I never recommend spending LinkedIn money on
audiences who aren't going to be a great fit for you, but if it
does make sense to go after other roles, a wider variety of
companies, then this can work great. It's important to understand
that expanding your audience should scale linearly. And that means
that as you increase your audience size, your costs per should not
increase, or at least not significantly. We had a client that we
followed exactly the same process, and we were able to nine x their
budget. And as we multiplied their traffic and leads by nine, our
cost per lead actually dropped a little bit. So this is what you
should expect. You're reaching new audiences who should hopefully
be just as excited about your product as your original audiences
were.
16:50
Okay, your second lever, let's say you've totally maxed out your
audience. It doesn't make sense to target any more of them or
target them in any other ways. Now, your net lever is going to be
getting a higher percentage of your existing audience to take
action. And really, this means increasing your click through rates.
So if you have an audience of 10,000 people, and let's say 1,000 of
them are active on each day, you can have a sponsored content ad
that's performing above average. So let's call it .5%, half of a
percent. And that means that you're only getting five clicks per
day from that campaign. So what if we could launch an ad that gets
double the click through rate, we're getting a 1% click through
rate. Now, all of a sudden, it's the same audience, we're doubling
the traffic that it's sending. And this will also scale linearly.
In fact, it scales better than linearly, because as your click
through rates go up, your cost per click will likely come down, at
least somewhat. I mean, usually we see if a click through rate with
doubles, we can usually get you know 30 cents to a $1.50 off of
each click. And so if you have control over the ad copy, maybe
you're changing motivations in the ad copy, maybe you're changing
imagery to get people to, we call them a thumb stoppers, get people
to stop scrolling, and pay more attention to your awesome ad copy.
Maybe your offer isn't very attractive and no matter how many ads
you write, you can't get people to click on that at a higher rate.
Maybe it's time for a new offer. We've found in a multitude of ad
copy tests that with any given offer, we can sway performance by 5%
to 15% by changing imagery, changing ad copy, just trying to
capture them a little bit better. And this is usually something
that ad managers have at their disposal. Usually you can write ad
copy. I mean, sometimes I know it has to go through legal and
approval and all that. But a lot of times this is something that
marketers can do very rapidly to test and find out ways that you
can get your click through rate higher. Generally, I don't care
about click through rates all too much. Because as long as I'm
spending my budget, and I'm only paying when someone clicks, then
why would I care about how many people actually saw it before they
clicked? Well, this is one of those circumstances, if you're
looking to scale, you're going to try to max out these audiences.
And now you'll have to pay a little bit more attention to, to click
through rates and impression counts, which is something that PPC,
advertisers don't really get into all too much. We're usually a lot
more focused on click through rate cost per click and cost per
conversion. To sum this one up, this is a great way to expand, but
sometimes you can't control, Maybe you've done all of the ad copy
testing, you can around your existing offer, and maybe you've
improved performance by 5% to 15%. But you can't go more than that,
then it's probably a good chance that you'll need to create a new
offer, which I realize is a big deal. It's a big undertaking to
create a whole new offer, if you don't already have a content team
working on something like that. Okay, after a quick sponsor break,
we'll dive into the third way you can scale your campaigns.
19:57
The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com the
LinkedIn Ads experts.
20:06
If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you,
B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We managed
LinkedIn's largest accounts. We're the only media buying agency to
be official LinkedIn partners. And of course, your 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 love to help you
absolutely demolish your goals.
20:29
Great, let's jump into the third lever that you have to pull to
scale your LinkedIn Ads account spending strategically and
efficiently. This third lever is to show more impressions, which
basically means you're going to bid more. Okay, so for an example,
you have this audience of 10,000. 1,000 of them are active on
LinkedIn every day. If your bids are too low, they're too
restrictive. They may be making your ads only eligible to be shown
to let's say, 200 of the thousand people who are acting So if you
go and raise your bids by 50 cents, or $1 per click, that makes it
a little bit more worth LinkedIn's while to to show your ads. So
now they may show you to 500 of the 1000. Keep in mind that there
is a point of diminishing returns, and you will find it as you
continue to increase your bids. So I'm going to walk you through a
very real example here. Let's say we want more volume, and our bids
are at a $7 CPC. Now we know that we're going to pay really close
to our bid. So let's say we're paying about $6.90, we go and raise
our bids to an $8 CPC. So we've raised it $1. And now our ads are
being shown to 500 out of 1,000 people, and now we're paying
probably $7.90. So again really close to our bid. But now we're
still not getting as much traffic as we want. So we increase our
bids to $10 per click. And now our ads are being shown to 950 out
of 1,000 people Now our cost per click are really close to $10.
Let's say it's $9.80. So the result here is now we're paying $3
more per click than when we started, and it gave us nearly double
the traffic. But if we have a conversion rate of 10%, that means
that your cost per lead just went up by $30. And maybe this is
worthwhile for you so we can keep going. Now, you don't know that
you've pretty much maxed out your audience, because in this
example, I'm telling you that you know, we reach 950 of the
thousand people. But LinkedIn doesn't tell you how active your
audience is, they don't tell you the number of total impressions
possible from your audience. So let's say you're saying, wow, I
just really need more traffic. So you go and increase your bids to
$14 per click, so you increased by $4. And now you're probably
paying somewhere close to about $13.70. Well, now you're bidding so
aggressively that LinkedIn gave you all thousand people, so you get
access to all thousand to show them an impression. But now you're
literally paying twice as much per click, you're now paying almost
$14 per click where you started out paying only $7 per click
before. So now your cost per lead doubled, and you only got 50 more
impressions than when you were bidding $10 or $4 less per click. So
certainly that's not worth it. And it's helpful to find that line
of diminishing returns. And I don't have a great formula for you
here. You know, we usually gut check it will we'll be watching our
effective cost per click. Over time as we were making these
changes, and we're also watching our impression volume. And if we
see our cost per click spiking up, but impression volume not
changing, then we know we've really maxed out that audience. And
this works no matter how you're bidding if you're bidding by cost
per click, cost per impression, or even auto bidding. You can chart
your effective cost per click over time, and you can chart your
impressions there with the performance chart button. We never want
to cross this diminishing returns line. That is unless you have a
massive budget, and it's worth it for you to pay a lot more to get
a proportionally smaller audience. If you pull this third lever of
increasing your bids, it's really super easy to scale. As long as
you're not near that line of diminishing returns. It's super easy
to just go and increase bids and watch your traffic jump up, but
certainly realize that this negatively affects your efficiency. So
if you're trying specifically to stay below a certain cost per
lead, or cost per conversion, or some kind of other action, realize
that the more you scale this up linearly, it's going to change your
cost per click. Because of this, I think this lever is one that I
will only pull when I have exhausted the first two levers. I've
expanded my audience every way I can. And I've also done a lot of
testing on my ad copy to try to improve that way before I ever bid
up. Or hey, maybe this is the first lever you pull when you're VC
funded. Hey, oh! Just kidding. What I want you to get out of all of
this is that scaling up doesn't have to cost more, you don't have
to lose efficiency. You'll want to start out by maxing out your
audience targeting and personas first. Then as soon as you've
scaled them up as far as they'll go without increasing bids, then
you can work on getting your click through rates up. And as you
know from Episode 10, coming out with a new offer can work wonders
here for improving your click through rates. Remember, if you have
a bad offer, there's only so much lipstick you can put on that pig.
There's only so many ad copy variations you can try without
realizing that it's really hard to get people to click on something
that's not interesting. And then only then do you want to increase
your bids and make sure to increase your budgets at the same time
because you never want to hit your budgets during the day. Remember
my rhyme if you hit your budgets during the day, you paid too much
for clicks along the way. It rhymes so it must be true. So follow
these steps and you'll reliably and profitable Be able to scale
your LinkedIn ad successes as high as the network will support.
Okay, so here are the episode resources for you.
26:13
Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more?
AJ Wilcox, take it away.
26:22
We talked in the news section about the engagement retargeting
announcement, you'll see a link to the Search Engine Journal
article that details why that's so cool. You'll also see links to
Episode 10 on offers that we've mentioned and Episode 11 about
targeting. If you are new to LinkedIn ads or just need to get up
leveled, check out the course that I did with LinkedIn
learning.com. You'll see a link for that right in the show notes.
It's either cheap or free, and it covers about the first hour and a
half of what I cover when I train teams one on one and I charge
$500 an hour. This course is either $25 or free. I can tell you
which one I'd suggest Pull out your phone right now look at the
podcast and make sure you've hit that subscribe button. If you like
this content, of course, I don't want you forcing yourself to
listen if this is boring, but I'd love to be in your ear holes for
future episodes. And then please do rate and review this podcast.
It's going to help other LinkedIn Ads marketers find it. And of
course, I'll get a chance to shout you out, too. If you have any
feedback for the podcast, any questions, any topics that you'd want
us to cover? Email us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And of course,
please do answer my two questions that I threw out there in the
news section. I would love to hear from you on this to decide how
we work with the show up here in the future. Okay, with that being
said, I'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your
LinkedIn Ads initiatives!