Jul 21, 2020
Show Resources:
Ep 23 - LinkedIn Ads Reporting Insights You Didn't Know Were Available
Ep 6 - LinkedIn Ads Bidding & Budgeting Strategies
LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course
Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.
Show Transcript:
Your LinkedIn Ads account is going great, but you want to raise. Here are the things you can do to bump performance, even if the account is already going great.
Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.
Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. So if things are going well in
your account, but you're looking for some further wins. Well, I've
got you covered. Today, we're going to be talking about the
optimizations that you can do whether your account has a couple
weeks of spend, or whether you've been a heavy spender for years.
No matter where you're at, I'm sure you'll definitely get something
out of this. In the news, as of the time of recording, LinkedIn is
on there twice yearly shut down. This happens twice a year, and
it's a whole week for the Fourth of July, and then a whole week at
the last part of December. So not a whole lot happening over there.
Not lots of new things coming out because they're all on vacation,
but support tickets are still being responded to, so all's right in
the world. On last week's episode, I told you about how several of
us advertisers noticed that our click through rates dropped
significantly on June 16, across a whole bunch of accounts. After a
little deep diving and data, it looks like the drop was mostly
noticed by those bidding cost per click, and not nearly as much by
those bidding either cost per impression or automated. So we're
gonna keep going, we're gonna keep digging and I'll definitely let
you know what we find. But if anyone has insight as to what might
have happened, I'd love to hear about it. Hit us up at
Podcast@B2Linked.com. Just one review today from riverton12 it says
"AJ is the best. Full disclosure I work for AJ at B2Linked. AJ is
the best at what he does. I have learned more since I started
working for him than I could have ever imagined. He explained stuff
so plainly and just gets to the point. What a boss." I hesitated to
read this one since it was from an employee, but I didn't ask my
employees to leave reviews. So I thought I'd go ahead and shout it
out. Steve, you know who you are. Thanks so much for the kind words
and making me sound like a douche by reading that out loud. All
right. I want to feature you. So definitely leave your review. Let
me know anything about you that you especially want me to shout out
on air. And let's keep these reviews cominng. All right, with that
being said, let's hit it.
Optimization
2:22
So the topic of optimization when things are going well, but you
want them to get better. And same kind of principle applies even if
your accounts not going well, and you're just trying to improve it.
But this is a lot simpler when you can see pockets of success that
you can capitalize on, and pockets of failure that you can take
care of bid down, turn off all those things. In advertising, I like
to think that we have two hurdles that we always have to get over
with our ads. I've used this analogy before, where the first hurdle
that we have to get over is we have to get people to click on the
ads. They have to be interesting enough that someone will want to
engage Then once they've clicked, now we need them to convert and
take the action that we're asking them to. And of course, many of
you are in some heavy business to business applications here. So we
can add some additional hurdles for things like getting them to mql
status, like marketing qualified lead, or SQL, sales qualified
lead. Maybe even all the way to close, where you've actually won
the business. So think of these like funnel stages, because if you
make it over one, but then totally trip and fall on the other,
you're not going to win the race, or you may not even finish. So
we'll talk about optimization techniques and things you should
watch for on both of those hurdles, both getting people to click on
your ads enough, and then getting those to convert. And I think it
makes sense to focus on two different areas of performance, where
we can eke some additional performance out of them. And so let's
start here with taking the worst things in the account and making
them better. Improve the worst. things so the average collectively
for the whole comes way up and makes the whole thing look better.
And of course, this really depends on what your definition of poor
performance is. Because poor performance to me could be you're not
getting enough volume, you're not spending your budget, or your
cost per lead or cost per conversion, or cost per click is just too
high, and it's dragging your performance down. So let's start with
probably the most obvious, if something's not working, you can just
shut it off. That means if you have a bad ad, or bad ads, or even
whole bad campaigns, you can just go and hit pause on them and shut
them off. Keep them from running. For audiences, you know, are not
going to be profitable or ads that you know aren't, this is a great
way to just get the performance gone. If you are after cost
efficiency, though. Let's say this a campaign is going okay. But
cost per conversion is just a little bit too high and it needs to
get cheaper. One of my favorite strategies here is to just bid
down. If you know that your ads are 15%, more expensive than they
should be, then you can go and bid down by 15%. And you will lose
some volume there, it won't get nearly as many clicks. But the
clicks and traffic you do get will be efficient. Let's say that you
listen to my advice in Episode 6 about bidding and budgeting, and
you have something that's performing not very well and so you've
bid it all the way to the floor, the very lowest price you can bid.
But let's say you're still spending too much or it's still
inefficient. Of course, you could shut it off. But you could also
limit the budget, lower the budget down, because if all of your
best performers are spending, you know, $50 a day, let's say, and
you take some of the worst and lower them down to where they're
spending maybe $10 per day. Sure, they may still be a little bit
inefficient, but on average, the whole account is going to look
better because you've minimized the bad performance.If you listen
to Episode 23, where Sam Fonoimoana offered you guys his free
targeting audit, which is amazing. If you haven't gotten it, go get
it. And you can use this for a lever that we call tightening our
targeting. If you know something's not performing very well, you
could take a look at the audience and see if there's any pieces of
that, that you could trim out or cut off entirely, leaving you with
a little bit less volume, but all the good stuff. This could be
things like narrowing your company sizes to only those who can
really afford you who are going to be top quality leads. Or maybe
you're including too many seniorities. Maybe the person who
actually feels your pain is a senior seniority, meaning that
they're an individual contributor. And if you're targeting, let's
say managers and directors, you're probably paying too much for
that traffic. And then what about your ads? Let's say your ads
performance is not great. There are some pretty simple things you
can do to those. Again, on episode six, we talked about About the
bidding and budgeting, and how your click through rate affects how
much you're paying. But if you're paying too much or not getting
enough traffic, one of the best things you can do is test new ad
copy. If you have click through rates on sponsored content that are
like, let's say, 0.4%, you're about average, you're probably going
to be paying $8 to $11 per click if you're targeting somewhere in
North America. So if you can launch some ads that increase, let's
say, you get up to 0.7 or 0.8%, click through rates, you'll likely
see your costs per click drop to around the $6 to $8 range, and
immediately you're 20%, 30% more profitable just because you've got
more people interested in clicking on your ads. We found the best
performance in testing to come from adjusting our intro text in ads
so that's usually the first AB test we're going to run. But if
you've noticed that your click through rates are coming down over
time, you're probably saturating that audience and it's probably a
good idea to give them something fresh. After all, if they've
already looked at your ad five times and just said, yeah, I'm not
going to click on that, then no matter what you do to the words,
they're still going to remember the creative the imagery. So try
changing out your imagery, give it a fresh look and see if you can
help improve your click through rates that wa. That will bring cost
down and it will bring volume up, and that will cover a multitude
of ills. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive
into how you can improve your best performers.
8:31
The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com,
the LinkedIn Ads experts.
8:40
If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you
B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We manage
LinkedIn's largest accounts. We're the only media buying agency to
become 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 love to help you absolutely
demolish your goals.
Improving Your Best Performers
9:05
All right, let's jump into the levers that you have to improve on
the stuff that's already working in your account. The same rule for
good performers applies here, where good performance could mean all
kinds of things to you so you'll have to pick and choose from here
what makes the most sense. But good performance could mean that
you're getting a really low cost per conversion. Or maybe you're
hitting the right volume of leads or fully spending your budget.
There are all kinds of things that you as advertisers will want to
focus on, and you may be gold on, you may get bonused by so that's
what we're gonna try to do. Find those particular levers and help
them out. The first thing I like to do with great performers is bid
them up. Because if you have a campaign that's performing, let's
say 30% better than average to the cost per lead, if you go and
increase your bids by 20%, you'll now likely get a lot more volume,
alot more clicks, and a lot more conversions, and you'll still be
10% more efficient than average. I call that a win. Now, of course,
if you ever increase your bids, you'll also want to increase your
budgets, because like we've talked about, if you hit your daily
budget during the day, you paid too much for your clicks along the
way. So make sure you raise your budgets high enough that your
campaigns aren't just hitting them in the middle of the day. You
want that to stretch all the way to the end, ideally. Same thing
here on improving your ad copy to improve on the already winning
ads. So you've got ads that are doing great. Well, there's probably
a test that you can run that will get you 5%, incremental 10% or
even 15% incremental gains. Test new ad copy, test new imagery,
test anything you can to improve just a little bit because really,
any increase in click through rate goes a long way to get costs
down and volume pretty much as high as you need it. I got to
consult on an account week that had 4% click through rates on their
sponsored content, it was absolutely incredible. They were paying
less than 30 cents per click from sponsored content. Oh, my heart
just sings when it sees metrics like that. So of course, I was
looking at that like a huge win. But then we go back 30 days and
see that 30 days ago, the performance they were running at 7% click
through rates. And so that means even after click through rates
fell to half of what they were, and performance was still amazing.
That means back then 30 days ago, they were getting less than 15
cent clicks. It's incredible. So it doesn't matter what kind of
performance you're seeing. If your ads have been running for a
while, we see that the average is like 27 to 33 days when ads will
start to fall off. Meaning if you're looking at their click through
rate over time, if you click on the performance chart, and sort by
average click through rate. You can watch this happen after about
27 to 33 days of saturating an audience, you'll see your click
through rates start to drop off a cliff. So even if you've got
great performance, you can make it even better or catch up to where
it was at the beginning before the saturation by just changing
things up a little bit. You don't necessarily have to change the
offer, you can just change the motivation and the imagery that
people are actually seeing in the ads. And I would be remiss if I
didn't bring up your offer here because we've seen even when you
have a good offer that's performing well, launching a new offer can
easily double or triple your results. So take a look at all of the
different offers that you've run and how they've converted. And try
to understand the ones that converted the best. What made them
amazing. Can we go and create more offers like that? Do we see
people like to attend our webinars? Do we see that they like guides
about a certain topic? Or will they convert like crazy on
checklists? Those are the things that you'll find out for your own
account. And test or try some new offers. We've also seen this
quite often where, let's say a guide was converting at 10%, which
was a little bit below average, but not terrible. And then we just
changed the title, change the name of the guide to maybe just hit
on a different motivation or pain point that your customer might be
feeling. The content of the white paper, the content of the guide
doesn't have to change, it's still gonna cover all of the same
great stuff, you're just presenting it in a little bit different of
a way. We've seen this literally double conversion rates. And
because the design of your guide has already been done, there's not
a whole lot of work necessary here to just change the title on a
PDF and swap it out on a web page. So there's something that takes
very little effort and can really, really pay off. Something else
we've found to be insanely successful is to take off your marketing
hat and put on your sales enablement hat. Go spend some time with
your sales team, show them what your targeting is like show them
the ads people are clicking on, show them the guides, people are
downloading, get them in the mindset of where they know what their
prospects are going through, so they can better tailor the
conversations. This will also give you an excuse to learn more and
get more feedback from sales that will help you optimize and close
that loop quicker. I want to tell you about what I call data
journey. Back in 2011, I was spending a good amount on LinkedIn
Ads, and LinkedIn didn't even have conversion tracking yet. And of
course, it wasn't going to come out for six more years,
unfortunately. I was waiting for a long time. But for simplicity, I
did all of my optimizations in the account based entirely off of
click through rate. I figured that any ad that people clicked on
significantly more was probably going to be the most interesting
and was probably going to convert the best. Then I started getting
access to my conversion numbers. Through analytics, I would run an
analytics report, I would run a LinkedIn report, drop them into
Excel, marry that data up, and then start doing these calculations
of what is my cost per lead?, what is my conversion rate? And this
is consequently, when I fell in love with Excel and data. Mmm,
sexy, sexy. But as I was doing that, I noticed something that I
thought was really strange. There was zero correlation between the
ad that had the winning click through rate, and the ones that had
the winning conversion rate, it was literally a coin flip, if the
ad that I had just promoted to keep running was even the right one
to keep promoting. So this opened my eyes quite a bit and I
realized, you always want to take action on the results that are
closest to the money. That means the furthest down the sales
funnel, you can possibly get data, at least at a large enough
sample size that it makes any sense. Since the closer you get to
the money, the more the data means the more accurate it's going to
be. The more predictable it becomes. Then another few months later,
I started getting a lot of mq l SQL proposals, closed numbers. And
I did the same thing to them. I brought them into Excel and started
doing all of this analysis. And I found that for every stage, the
ad or the campaign that converted higher, it was a little bit more
likely to mql higher, and then even more so an ad or a campaign
that mql'd. at a high rate, it was even more likely to sql or
proposal and then close at a high rate. So the principle here of
this story is that you want to optimize for the deepest sales stage
that you have enough data for because you can totally ignore poor
click through rates if your conversion rates are amazing or lead
quality is so high that you keep closing everyone who clicks. So
who cares if an offer converts amazingly well, but you've spent $1
million on it and nothing has turned into close business. Or
conversely, if your conversion rate is absolutely miniscule, but
every conversion ends up closing, we actually have a client like
this right now where their webinar is converting at 6% with cold
traffic. And I would have looked at that and said, man, 6%, that's
really low for a webinar, we really haven't hit the mark here.
Let's go back to the drawing board and try something else. But he
is closing business like crazy. And based off of their deal sizes,
they are running probably a 10 x ROI Right Now, this can be a
little uncomfortable for those of you who are testing, because if
you see something performing poorly, you may want to hurry and get
rid of the poor performance. But if you can take a look at what's
happening after the realm of poor performance, let's say it's a bad
click through rate. But wait until you've gotten some conversion
and see if it's going to make up for it. And I've mentioned that
you want to make sure that you have enough data to actually analyze
here. What I found is my results to the click through rate
generally becomes statistically significant after about $1,000 in
ad spend. Now keep in mind that is in North America and in the
English language where it tends to be the most competitive. If as
soon as you leave the English language, or really go outside of
North America, your costs are going to drop significantly, meaning
that you'll probably be able to get enough data for even less
money. And if you care about your conversion rates, and your cost
per conversion. And again, if you're in North America with a
content offer that's converting between, let's say 12 and 15%. It
usually takes about $5,000 in ad spend to get statistical
significance around those values. And of course, you don't have to
spend that over one day or a month even. All you need is that
amount of data to attribute. Now all mentioned, if you're not
converting at 12 to 15%, let's say you have a harder offer like Get
a demo, talk to sales, buy something now, or maybe it is a content
offer, it just doesn't convert very high, then be aware, you're
probably going to have to spend significantly more in order to get
that same level of statistical significance. So I would recommend
starting out with a really good content offer. From my experience
95% of the time, the math works out in favor of content, and
getting a cheaper cost per lead, but then nurturing that person to
a sales conversation, rather than just going immediately for the
kill and going right to the sales conversation. But certainly,
because it's 95% of the time, you might be that 5%. And so I
recommend that everyone test a little bit, and then you'll know for
your own brand performance. But if you have to spend $1,000 to get
statistical significance for your click through rates, and $5,000
to get statistical significance for conversion rates. To get
statistical significance for mql's you may have to spend twice Or
three times to get significance around sql's, it might be three or
four times more than that. So this is where we depart from where
advertising as a creative endeavor and gets way more into an
analytical and a predictive one. Any of you who are lovers of data?
Oh, the world is yours. I'm calling it 2020 is the year of the
technical marketer. Okay, I've got the episode resources for you
coming up right after the break. So stick around.
20:32
Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads show. Hungry for more?
AJ Wilcox, take it away.
20:43
Okay, I mentioned Episode 23. with Sam Fonoimoana giving his free
audit around your targeting, go back and listen to that episode.
definitely take advantage of it because this is an audit that you
cannot do yourself. Also, we talked a lot about bidding and
budgeting and this one So if you need a refresher or want to go a
lot deeper, go check out Episode 6, all about bidding and
budgeting. And if you are new to LinkedIn Ads, go check out my
course on LinkedIn Learning. It's just over an hour long. And it
covers pretty much what I would cover if you hired me to come in
and train your team one on one. To bring me and it would be $500 an
hour, but this course is either free, or I think only $25 if you
don't have access to LinkedIn Learning already, so definitely, I
know which one I would choose. Take a look down right now at your
podcast player and subscribe on whatever player you're listening
on. And please do rate the podcast. And of course I would love five
stars, but if you just don't think that my poor ginger soul
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leave a review for the podcast. I'd love to shout you out. And
especially I'd love to see a review on Stitcher. So those of you
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right now and it could use a little bit of love. Any ideas for what
you'd like us to cover in the show? Or topics? Or questions? Email
us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. I would absolutely love to hear from
you. All right with that being said, I will see you back here next
week. I'm cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiative.