Sep 29, 2020
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View your company page followers.
New update to the playbook on targeting from LinkedIn
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Show Transcript:
Here are five more common LinkedIn Ads mistakes. Are you making any of them? Just fix them quickly, and your boss will never know.
Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.
Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! One of our most popular episodes was the top five mistakes that LinkedIn advertisers make. That was Episode 18 in case you missed it. Make sure you go and listen to it is super valuable. Well, we tend to see a lot of mistakes happening so we put together five more. Again, in no particular order, you may be making some of these and others you might not. So let's jump into it. First, though, in the news, LinkedIn rolled out a new bidding interface. And it's not out to everyone, at least at the time of recording here, but it's on its way rolling out to everyone. And you'll notice it still defaults to auto bidding, but now that's called maximum delivery. And then within parentheses, it says auto bidding. The other option is manual bidding. And for each of these options, you can select the optimization action that you would like LinkedIn to optimize towards. So that is your clicks, leads, just impressions. And it's been interesting to test these out, but we still see that we get the best results from either auto bidding, if we have high click through rates, or bidding manual, enhanced CPC and bidding low if it's below. There was a great announcement that I'm super excited about. You can see the link in the show notes below. But now LinkedIn allows you to view your company page followers. And when you go and check that out, it will tell you the month that that person became a company page follower. So I'm really excited to use this data to visualize the growth of our company page. And I hope you are as well. Episode 31, if you remember, was an interview with Ryan Mcinnis from LinkedIn about the Brand and Demand playbook that they released. Well, they also released an updated version of the Targeting playbook. You'll also find that link there in the show notes that you can go and download that and check it out. I have kind of a mixed reaction to this one. I really like that when they updated it, they called the seniority that they call senior, they actually labeled it what it is, senior individual contributor. The vast majority of LinkedIn advertisers get tripped up by senior because they think oh, senior managers, senior directors, senior VPS. That's not what it's talking about. It's actually referencing someone who's not entry level, but not yet a people manager. It's exactly what they're saying. It's an individual contributor, that they call senior for some reason. So that was really cool to see them point out. But I was put off a little bit because going through there, you'll see that they include a recommendation for enabling audience expansion. And if you've listened to more than like three episodes, you know my stance on audience expansion and how I think it's utter and complete garbage. So maybe research it and take that advice with a grain of salt, realizing that some is probably good, some might not be so good. But you'll want to make that call. It's probably worth checking out at least what LinkedIn recommends. What LinkedIn recommends for targeting is a lot of what we recommend too if you've been listening. A shout out to Ron Halpern, who left a review for us, and he says, "One stop shop for all LinkedIn ad info. This podcast is my secret weapon at work. It keeps me up to date and current on things that make me invaluable. Thanks to AJ, his passion and his ability to break down the very info around marketing on LinkedIn. If you're looking to run ads on this platform, you must listen to AJ. The performance benchmarks he shares make it worth it 100% on their own, but he is so ridiculously abundant with his knowledge, even a hardened pro would find his podcast valuable." Ron, I'm so glad that me and the team can be here to be your secret weapon at work. We're super happy to superpower you and sincerely thanks for leaving such a stellar review and sharing it out to the world. That's so incredibly meaningful to us. The next is from BarrettDastrup, who says, "Can't believe this info is free. I've been listening consistently for less than a week and have already applied multiple bits of advice I've picked up from AJ. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for just getting to the point and packing this time with only the useful information. no fluff here. Love it." Barrett, I'm so glad you appreciate that no fluff style. Personally, I just can't stand content where it feels like they're trying to hold stuff back or they themselves don't have a deep enough understanding to go deep. So I'm so glad that you appreciate that as well. That's definitely our style. Okay, I totally want to feature you. So make sure you leave a review on any podcast player that you use, and I'll totally give you a shout. And if you don't want to be shouted out publicly, well instead just tell your friends at work about the show privately or leave a review with an anonymous name. Okay, with that being said, let's hit it.
4:54
Wrong Objective
Again in no particular order, one of the biggest mistakes that we
see is people selecting the wrong objective. Last week's episode
was Episode 34, all about objectives. So make sure you go and
listen to that to go a little bit deeper here. But at a high level,
when you're presented with LinkedIn objectives, and you see
something like oh conversions, and you think, yeah, I'm going for
conversions, and you select that option, I would totally understand
where you're coming from. Unfortunately, LinkedIn is usually
optimizing for max, and not for cheapest or most efficient. What
this means is, if you're optimizing for conversions, LinkedIn is
going to go out and bid as high as it needs to, to try to get the
most amount of conversions. And they're not optimizing for what we
see most advertisers care about, which is getting the right volume,
but not at crazy costs. So go and listen to last week's episode
about objectives to dive deeper into them. And it's really helpful
to understand what you think you're optimizing towards, versus what
LinkedIn actually is optimizing towards, or at least attempting to.
The one that really seems to trip people up is the lead generation
objective. Because everyone goes in and goes, yeah, I'm generating
leads, that's what I'm looking to do so they click that, just to
find out that when they create the campaign and start creating ads,
that can't send traffic to their website, because lead generation
as an objective, ropes you into only doing the native lead
generation form ads. So they're definitely worth understanding at a
deeper level. And do make sure that you put in the work to
understand what each of the objectives do, so that you can ensure
that you're selecting the proper one. And if your goal really is to
spend all of your budget and you don't care about efficiency, then
the objectives that LinkedIn gives, you actually should line up
very nicely. But if your goal is efficiency, you'll probably end up
using an objective differently than LinkedIn would recommend.
6:49
Wrong Size of Budget
The next big mistake here
in our list is advertising with the wrong size of budget. And we
covered budget in Episode 19 really deeply, so go have a listen to
that. But this really goes both ways. Advertisers with too large of
a budget, and advertisers with way too small of one. The most
common here is we regularly see advertisers who read our
recommendations of you know, budgets of $5,000 a month, and say,
"Well, I don't really have that kind of budget, but I'm gonna give
it a shot anyway." And of course, you're dealing with small sample
sizes here, so some tend to get lucky and they'll close a deal in a
very small amount of spend, or they'll happen to get a really high
conversion rate with just a few clicks. But most don't really get
lucky like that. And just remember that the real value of LinkedIn
is in the lead quality, which really isn't measurable from the
platform itself. To adequately test the lead quality, you've got to
get these leads into your CRM and compare them against other lead
sources. So that you can tell that, yes, LinkedIn ads are
generating traffic that are so high quality, that even though we
have to pay three to five times more for each lead, they're
definitely worth at least three to five times more to me. We talked
to a lot of people who are saying, let's advertise for a month, and
then we'll see if the return on investment is there. And I always
have to stop them and say, well, you're not going to see a return
on your investment after one month when your sales cycle is six to
10 months or even 15 months or longer. So same warning, if you go
in with too small of a budget, or too tight of a timeframe that you
hope to see results in, you'll probably be a little bit
disappointed. But what about the other side? What about having too
large of a budget? Usually, what happens if your budget is too
large, you'll end up just paying too much for traffic. And then
later, when you do your analysis, LinkedIn will look really
inefficient. And you'll end up cutting the budget anyway. The way
that this works is if you're using auto bidding, LinkedIn is going
to look at your massive budget and say, "Oh, I'm going to bid
really insanely high to make sure that I can spend all that budget
to this audience." But if you're bidding really intelligently,
let's say you're using manual bidding, you'll still likely end up
bidding really high manually, just to make sure that you can spend
your budget. And as you know, as your click costs go up, so do your
costs per lead. And the channel will end up looking really
inefficient. At some point in the ecosystem in the in the bidding
auction environment, you end up passing this point of diminishing
returns, where LinkedIn will keep charging you more for each click.
But, it won't when you additional traffic volume in the auction, it
won't get you additional impressions, you're just paying more for
each individual impression. So I'm a big fan of starting out small
start on smaller budgets. And then once you've nailed it, then
worry about scaling it. And if you're scaling up from starting low,
it's really easy to see that line of diminishing returns, as you
said, "Oh I raised my bids from $14 to $14.50 and my cost per click
went up by 50 cents, but I didn't get any additional impressions
for that money." It's a lot simpler to do. So as you're pitching
your boss or the board or the CEO, or whomever, make sure you ask
for a budget, usually to start with between $5,000 and $10,000 per
month, and then it's really easy to scale up or even back from
there. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break. And then we'll dive into
more common mistakes.
10:28
The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com,
the LinkedIn Ads experts.
10:37
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Alright, let's jump into the next three common mistakes that you
might be making on your LinkedIn Ads.
11:16
Not AB Testing
One big mistake that we see people make is that they're not AB
testing, they're not running any testing in their account. And for
the record, this topic deserves its whole own episode. But just
touching on it lightly. Because LinkedIn targeting is so tight, and
so good, it enables you to get to run, like what I call silent
focus groups. You can use your targeting to define very specific
small, tight knit groups that all have something in common. And if
you run the same ad, or the same two ads to these two separate
audiences that are similar, but varied by one thing, it's really
like getting to run a focus group. And you get to find out what
your prospects like what they don't like, and what will get them to
convert. So for instance, if I'm targeting marketing decision
makers, I could make it really easy for myself and just target job
function of marketing, and seniority of everything manager and
above. And that's one campaign. It would be really easy to manage.
Ceate two ads within it, and I'm done. But the problem with that is
that you'll end up with all of the results that you get with
nothing to compare it to. And if results are bad, or if they're
good, you don't have any sort of levers that you can pull, or even
learn from. So instead do something like a separate campaign for
marketing managers, another for directors, another for marketing
VPs, and a final one for CMOS. And you run the same two ads across
them, and you find out, Oh, wow, it's less expensive to reach CMOS
than we thought, or marketing managers aren't really resonating
with our content. Those are the types of insights that you can get.
A lot of times we see campaigns with only one ad running in them.
And that sure seems like a waste, because it doesn't take a whole
lot of effort to create one additional ad. And then you'll get to
learn about what motivation is driving your potential customer, you
can look at the cost per click, and the click through rate to
understand how engaging each version of the ads are. And of course,
down the line your conversion rates as well. So if you're only
running one ad, you're missing that ability to have a second
version to compare against. So you just kind of have to take
whatever performance you get. And then we also see the opposite of
this mistake, which is also a mistake of trying to test too much.
Because LinkedIn is targeting ability is so good. Many are tempted
to create way too many audiences or way too tight of targeting that
creates tiny audiences. Now remember that every campaign has to
have a minimum budget of $10 per day. So do the math at you know,
at least $300 per month for each campaign and see if that would
make you overspend your budget. So don't create so many campaigns
that even at the minimums you're gonna overspend your budget. And
even if you don't overspend your budget, you may end up getting so
few results on each small campaign, that you don't really learn
anything about those audience segments anyway. You're going to look
at them at the end of the month and say, I can't take action on a
campaign with only 20 clicks. So maybe I'll let this go for another
month. And then that goes on adn on. My personal rule of thumb is
to make sure that each campaign has a budget of at least $1,000 per
month, at minimum. And that way, if I have a an introductory budget
of $5,000 per month, I'm not going to go and create 20 campaigns.
Along the same lines as over targeting. There's also running too
many ads at a time. And of course there are exceptions to this
rule. But in general, I would say don't be tempted to run more than
two ads inside of any given campaign because if you do Some of your
variations will get fully ignored. And then I wonder why would you
even worry about creating variations that will just get labeled
with a poor relevancy score, and they'll never see the light of
day. They'll never get enough data to actually compare anything. So
if you run two at a time, you'll always get enough data across both
of those variations to at least get a flavor of what's going on. We
covered this in Episode 29, about Ad saturation. But if you have
more than two ads in a campaign, it will cause your campaigns to be
able to be shown to the more active members, more often. Which
sounds good, except what you'll end up doing is fully saturating
the most active users of LinkedIn, and then not giving proper
coverage to everyone else. But if you're always running two at a
time, you're going to saturate pretty evenly.
15:48
Targeting Too Broadly
The next mistake we see is targeting too broadly. And there's a
couple different variations of this, there's where your audience
size is too large, or your targeting is too broad, and you're going
to be getting less qualified people in there. We'll tackle that one
first. So if you're targeting too broadly, it's probably because
when you were setting up your audiences, you were feeling this FOMO
or fear of missing out, because you were looking at the targeting
options and thinking, Oh, well, we'll be missing out on that one
lone diamond in the rough, if we don't include the adjacent
department, to the people that we're actually trying to target. In
my mind, I see the these like, like concentric circles, or even a
Venn diagram, where your most core audience is the very center, and
they're the ones that you should fully concentrate on. And then
once you've fully covered your most core, the highest impact users,
then you can start looking at ways to branch out and reach a few
more people that way, I'm sure we all have a story where we got
some golden lead from someone who, when we looked at them on
LinkedIn, they didn't fit the targeting criteria that we would
usually call the perfect customer. But try to overcome that FOMO
and instead, just worry about fully attacking your absolute core of
prospects first, then once you've nailed it, you can scale out more
broadly. On average, your core group of users will be the most
efficient. So don't get FOMO and think, well yeah, I guess an
accountant could be interested in my service. We see this one quite
regularly, where we see audiences get built with too large of a
size. And what happens here is you won't learn much about your
audience, because you'll see all of those results coming into one
large segment. And like we talked about before, if you're just
looking at one large segment, there's nothing to compare against.
So if we talk about that original example, targeting marketers,
breaking them up by seniority, so that you can learn what levels of
seniority interact with your content, or offers in certain ways.
But it doesn't have to be seniority. You could break up by
geography, or skill, company size, basically anything that you want
to compare performance for, and then learn from the difference. You
can break up your campaigns, I really like to see audiences between
about 20,000 to 80,000. So if I have an audience that's much larger
than that, I'll just find some arbitrary excuse to break it up into
into two or three or five. So then I'm learning exactly what my
ideal prospects like what they don't. And I get to learn from that
silent focus group. Alright, I've got the episode resources coming
up for you. So stick around.
18:37
Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more?
AJ Wilcox, take it away.
18:47
So check out these articles that we talked about in the news
section. The first is and these will be right for you in the show
notes. There's a link where you can see how to view your company
page followers. That's really cool going all the way back
historically on the month and year that that person started
following you. Super cool, I was excited for that. The next is the
article on the new update to the playbook on targeting from
LinkedIn. So definitely worth having a look to see if they're
suggesting anything that you haven't considered before. And then if
you're trying to learn LinkedIn Ads, or if you have a colleague, or
a friend who is, check out the course that I did with LinkedIn
Learning, I think it's only $25. Or it's free if you have a
professional subscription to LinkedIn. And it's a really good intro
to LinkedIn Ads. Take a look down at your podcast player and make
sure that that subscribe button is all lit up. That way you'll
make sure to not miss an episode. And please do rate the
podcast and leave us a review. If you're willing to I'd love to
shout you out. And as always, reach out to us at
Podcast@B2Linked.com with suggestions for episodes and topics,
questions, or anything your little heart desires. With that being
said we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your
LinkedIn Ads initiatives.