Oct 20, 2021
Here were the resources we covered in the episode:
Slide of benchmarks and hurdles
NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox
Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.
Show Transcript
One of the most important skills that you can learn as you're managing LinkedIn Ads campaigns. That's right. We're talking about troubleshooting your ad performance. Let's do it.
Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.
Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. I'm really excited about the topic today. And I have a special guest that I want to introduce you to. But before that, a quick story about why this topic is so important to me. So back while I was working on my undergrad at Brigham Young University here in Utah, I got a job doing tech support. And it was like second level tech support. So a little bit techier than what I was used to. And I was responsible for internet connections and servers for 30,000 or more locations. I've always been really good with computers, but the topic of internet and modems and networks was all new to me at this point. So I went through the training process and I did my best to do what I could which was memorizing the different tactics of ways you can fix things. And you techies will probably appreciate this part. I found that it was pretty common to reboot the router or the modem and that would work to restore their internet connection.
Have you tried turning it off and on again? Hello, IT? Have you tried turning it off and on again?
AJ Wilcox 3:09
I also found that sometimes computers had proxy settings
erroneously set up in the browsers. On one of my first calls that I
ever had with a customer, unbeknownst to me, my manager was
listening to the call, I was super nervous and I was asking the
customer to try everything. We were rebooting modems and routers,
we were checking proxy settings, we were all over the board. My
manager right after the call, he called me into his office, and he
taught me a principle that would serve me my entire life. He taught
me that throwing every tactic I knew at the problem was super
inefficient. And that the much better way to do this would be to
systematically test through the system. In the case of computer
networking, he taught me that you can either work from the outside
to the inside, which would be like checking the internet connection
to the building first, and then moving to the router to see if it's
working, and then to each computer. Or you can work from the inside
to the outside. So check the computer status first, and then move
to the router, then move to the modem. And he taught me that it
didn't matter which direction you started from, but that the most
important thing was ruling out the tactics that wouldn't be useful
and helpful to try in our troubleshooting. That skill of systematic
testing is something that I took with me into digital marketing and
I count it as being one of the most important skills that I could
have had and I would recommend that any other marketer can have.
Today's guest is going to teach us how to apply these same
troubleshooting and testing strategies to your marketing which will
make you an infinitely better advertising professional, especially
on LinkedIn where the stakes are just quite honestly higher due to
the high costs. Let's hit it.
Alright everyone, I'm super excited to introduce you to Parker Williams, who's on our team. He is one of B2Linked's most senior account managers. He's built and sold his own company. He grew a startup software company from zero to 1 million in ARR, he's married with two kids, lives in Mesa, Arizona, and if he's not working, he's either mountain biking or riding his dirt bike. Parker, so excited to have you here. Thanks for coming on.
Parker Williams 5:13
Man, it's a pleasure, AJ. Happy to be here.
AJ Wilcox 5:16
Alright, so maybe give us the backstory here. The topic that we're
talking about today is troubleshooting. Why did you feel like this
was such an important topic? And why did you volunteer to hop on to
get grilled by me?
Parker Williams 5:27
Yeah, no, that's a great question. I feel like my career in
marketing or as a marketer really pivoted when I started to
understand the process of troubleshooting because, you know, I
think back to early days, when I got into marketing, marketing my
own company when things went wrong, which they always do, I always
approached it with a process of like, throw spaghetti at the wall
and see what sticks which to some people that might work, but it
didn't work for me. I would freak out, I get nervous or running
advertising campaigns, like, you kind of panic, and you start
making decisions that are not good when things don't go right. And
so I feel like once I understood the process of troubleshooting an
ad campaign, sales campaign, it was pivotal for my career as a
marketer, I started to excel and started to find areas to improve,
and I started to see success faster than previously. So I feel like
it's crucial, very crucial.
AJ Wilcox 6:29
I totally agree. I think as a marketer, you really can advance. You
can have great positions by just throwing spaghetti at the wall to
see what sticks, right? My personal feeling on it is, if you
actually understand the process right from beginning to end, you
understand what makes a difference where, you're thinking more
strategically as a marketer, and less tactics focused. And I think
ultimately, that makes us a much better marketer because you can
see the whole picture.
Parker Williams 6:56
Yeah, exactly. It becomes an engineering and science game versus
like, a guessing game, you know, you know exactly what to do to
improve an ad campaign or not necessarily know what to do, but you
know what to focus on next. And because it didn't work, doesn't
mean it's not going to work. And so being able to troubleshoot
something it's way better. It's just so much more, it's more fun to
me when you approach it that way.
AJ Wilcox 7:26
Same here, I've said this before, but basically, every time I run a
test, doing something with LinkedIn Ads, despite the fact that I've
got 10 plus years of experience, I feel like I'm really good and
comfortable on the platform, I still am going to fail half the
time, right? And most of us don't want to admit that, but
everything we do in marketing is a test. So if you're going to be
testing things, but you don't know what your inputs are, what your
levers are, you're probably going to be running some pretty risky
campaigns.
Parker Williams 7:56
Right? I heard an advertiser I think was Frank Kern. He's like a
big time advertiser, marketer. He mentioned one time, like if if
marketing worked every time like we'd all be, it would be easy.
Everybody would be millionaires, and super rich, and like, we would
never have any issues. But this is not the case with marketing. It
never works the first time. Sometimes it does, but it rarely does.
And like being able to troubleshoot things that don't work, like
that's a game changer. That's a huge game changer.
AJ Wilcox 8:30
It is. It takes it from an art where only a few people are skilled
and turns it into a science where right anyone can follow a
repeatable process. I love that. So maybe share with us a specific
experience where you had to troubleshoot and walk us through that
process. What you thought about what it took.
Parker Williams 8:47
Yeah, that's a great question. So you know, initially, when I came
on and started helping manage ad accounts at B2Linked, one of the
things that was stressful to me was, click through rates. Getting
click through rates above our benchmark, which was 0.4%. And I
remember I was assigned a client, they're called Asahi Kasei,
they're a big Japanese company. Our click through rates were a bit
low and I didn't know what to do. I didn't know how to get him up.
AJ actually gave a training on troubleshooting and showed the
process of how to fix problems or solve problems in advertising. He
presented us levers that you can pull at certain points or certain
hurdles that you're experiencing. And so in this case, my click
through rates were low. And I knew from that training that I had
certain levers I could pull to improve that click through rate and
so one of the things we tested was the headlines and the intro text
or they were text ads in this case. And so we started to tailor our
ad copy to be more industry specific and we saw a dramatic increase
in our our click through rates. I think we went from like, they
were text ads, so they were less than .04 percent. We were like
.01, .02 percent like really low, but our average click through
rates went up above .04 percent, which was a game winner for their
ads.
AJ Wilcox 10:10
And for the uninitiated, that is basically it's almost two times
the average for text ads. So we took something that was performing
below benchmark, and then doubled LinkedIn to benchmark with it.
That's pretty awesome. Right? So this might sound a little bit
silly, but why did you decide based on knowing that the click
through rates were having an issue? Why didn't you go and make
changes to the landing page or recommend a different offer? Or, you
know, why did you go right for the headline in the description?
Parker Williams 10:38
Yeah, so I think that goes to kind of the process of, you know,
troubleshooting, what is it? And how do you prioritize what things
you need to fix? And so, you know, I chose click through rate
initially, because that was our first hurdle. And then I had listed
from that training, different levers we could pull to improve it,
or improve or overcome that hurdle. And I prioritized ad copy
because that was the initial contact point. And so I knew that that
would be the priority. The landing page, in this case, it was a
follower ad. So there wasn't really a landing page, but if there
was a landing page, like it wouldn't improve that click through
rate, it wouldn't impact it. So I chose the headline, because
that's what people are engaging with, or the audience was engaging
with. I knew it would impact it more than changing the audience. I
guess that was another lever, like before changing the audience,
which is a lot of work. We could test something minor and quick. So
that was a big reason.
AJ Wilcox 11:44
Yeah. So it sounds like a silly question. But those are the kinds
of things you might do as a marketer, if you didn't know what
levers you could pull to get better performance, you might just
say, Oh, I I know how to make landing pages convert better. I have
a poor click through rate here, but let me go and work on the
landing page and try to get better performance, when that's really
not your pain. Can you walk us through? What are the hurdles that
we face as advertisers? And maybe what are the levers that you can
pull if we're stumbling over one of those hurdles?
Parker Williams 12:14
Yeah, absolutely. Back to the point of which hurdles we pull on
advertising, there's two main ones, which is click through rate and
conversion rates. There's levers for each one. And a lot of times,
they're very similar levers, like ad copy, or messaging, or
audience or your call to action. Those are some examples of levers
you can pull. The click through rate, we can discuss what those
levers are and then we can discuss what the conversion rate levers
are next. So the first levers I usually look at when it comes to
click through rate is ad copy. So your intro text, your headline,
or your image text, right, your image ad copy. The next thing I'll
look at or consider is the image, you know, is the image engaging.
Is it interesting? Does it look too ad-ish? Does it capture
people's attention? So that's the next thing I'll usually test. The
other library you have is that you can pull is the offer, the
actual offer that you're advertising. So if you're advertising an
E-book or a white paper, what exactly is that offer? Is it enticing
enough to get your individual, your audience to engage with you? I
don't usually go to that offer, or I don't go to that level until
I've tested everything because to change an offer, that's a lot of
work. So before changing the offer, I'll even test the audience.
Maybe our audiences just slightly off, maybe we're not targeted
enough. Or maybe we're too broad. So those are the levers I
typically pull when it comes to click through rates. Conversion
rates, they're going to be similar.
AJ Wilcox 13:50
Actually, let's stop right there. What is the punishment you
receive as an advertiser if your click through rates aren't
great?
Parker Williams 13:57
Yeah, that's a great question. To answer that question, it can be
pretty in depth or it can be pretty simple. If your click through
rate is low, let's say 0%. You're not getting any clicks. Right?
That's the first terrible thing that can happen. But if you are
getting clicks, let's say you're getting .2% click through rate.
And from that same ad, targeting that same audience if you double
that, so let's say .2 and a half percent if you double that, it's
5.5% click through rate, you just doubled your clicks from the same
amount of impressions. And so your efficiency just doubled with
that one ad. We can go into depth on that, but it's it's pretty
simple at the same time, like poor click through rate like your
gate to the ad performance is not opened all the way. It's like not
performing at all.
AJ Wilcox 15:00
And then I think if you are bidding by the impression, let's say
you are using LinkedIn to auto bidding, literally, you just reach
twice the number of people for the same cost. I mean, literally,
when you say you doubled efficiency, it's true. But if you are
bidding by the click, you're basically like trying to bribe
LinkedIn to get them to show your ads. If you have a .2% click
through rate. It's like, alright, LinkedIn then I'll try bidding
$15, will you show me then? What if I bid $20. And on the other
hand, if you've doubled that, and now you're at like the .5%, you
can bid down significantly, you're paying so much less for the
traffic. And of course, it matters in your scale, and it matters in
your ads efficiency. So I think that's a really good example.
Parker Williams 15:45
It's also kind of like a faucet, like everyone uses a faucet
everyday when they brush their teeth, right? If you turn on your
faucet, just a tiny bit, and you had drips coming out, that's kind
of like a 0.1% click through rate, and you got to wash off your
toothbrush, like you can't do that with drips. And so if you
increase that click through rate, and you open your faucet more,
you're gonna get more clicks, and it's going to achieve your goal
faster, you're gonna be able to test faster, you're going to be
able to prove your offer faster, you're going to be able to, you're
gonna have way more data to work with. So I always think of faucets
when I think of click through rate, like, that's your faucet to
your funnel. So if your click through rates are low, like, you're
not gonna have any data for conversions, which is the next
hurdle.
AJ Wilcox 16:27
Oh, so true. And I love that metaphor, because I can imagine, if
you're trying to wash your toothbrush out with drips, think of how
many toothbrushes you can wash when the faucets going full blast, I
mean, several can be under there, that could be a whole bunch of
different tests around. That leaves us really, really nicely to the
second hurdle. So tell us about the second hurdle and tell us why
it's important. And maybe what levers you'd be trying to pull to,
to effect a change there.
Parker Williams 16:53
Yeah, absolutely. So that the next hurdle is conversion rates. This
can change quite a bit depending on where you're sending traffic
to. I know there's a lot of native forums on LinkedIn now, even
other platforms as well. If you're running traffic to like a lead
form, the levers are going to be a little different. If you're
running traffic to a landing page, the levers are going to be a
little little different, but it's the same hurdle. And so let's
just use the example of running traffic to a landing page. The
levers you're going to pull there are going to be similar to click
through rates. The first thing I like to check or prioritize is my
ad copy on the landing page. Now, what is the messaging? Is it
congruent with the ad, for example, if you're running an ad
campaign for like the ultimate guide to LinkedIn advertising, and
that's in your ad, and they come to a landing page, that's like the
ultimate guide to Google advertising? What do you think's going to
happen to that conversion rate, it's going to not be that great,
because people that clicked on the ad came the landing page with
the expectation to be served the Ultimate Guide to LinkedIn
advertising. So messaging needs to be congruent with your ads to
see good conversion rates. So that's usually what I like to test
first, is the messaging on the landing page. The other lever that I
moved to next is traffic, is the traffic clean that we're sending
to the landing page. Is it the right audience, that's an easy lever
to pull, it doesn't take a lot of effort to pull that. So the other
lever is going to be your offer? Is your offer back to the ad
campaign? Is it something that's irresistible to your audience? Are
they going to be stupid for not saying yes to this offer,
basically. So those are the typical levers we pull, you know, there
are little tactical things, but I don't think those last they work
and change all the time. But really, it's your offer, message, and
audience that you need to focus on.
AJ Wilcox 18:48
And what I want everyone to get out of this, if you've listened to
me for any amount of time, you've heard me say that the offer is
everything. Notice how when Parker was talking, the offer was
actually a piece of the troubleshooting and the performance for
both improving the click through rate and improving the conversion
rate. Literally, it feels like you're pulling teeth, trying to get
traffic on LinkedIn, your performance really sucks. Take a hard
look at your offer. Because more often than not, when you've tested
everything, and you just can't figure out like why are my ads not
working? It's because the offer isn't attractive enough. Think of
it from the perspective of your prospect. If they look at it, just
like Parker said, is it irresistible? They would be stupid not to
put their their information in to get this or is it something super
high friction, like sign up for a trial or hop on the phone with a
sales rep where it's scaring them away active,
Parker Williams 19:43
Your audience temperature can play a big part in that too. And
that's that goes to the to what you said earlier, like maybe the
offer isn't positioned at the right time for that audience. So if
you're targeting, like a LinkedIn Ad campaign we'll use that as an
example. If you're targeting cold audience like, let's say your
offers a free trial 30 day trial, no one knows likes or trust you,
you're probably gonna have low conversion rates with with something
like that. But if this audience has engaged with your content,
they've raised their hand to other pieces of content that's created
demand for your product or service. retargeting those people or
putting uploading a list of those people and targeting them with a
30 day trial, you probably see higher conversion rates than you
would with a cold audience.
AJ Wilcox 20:35
Oh, very true. That know, like, and trust factor is ultra
important. And if someone already knows likes and trusts you,
they'll be open to a really high friction offer. But I think you
have to earn that trust, you have to earn that like and so much of
what we do, I think in terms of cold traffic, because so much of
what we do on LinkedIn is reaching new audiences we haven't reached
before. That's really really insightful. Here's a quick sponsor
break, and then we'll dive into the rest of the interview,
Speaker 4 21:02
the LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com,
the LinkedIn Ads experts.
AJ Wilcox 21:12
If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you
B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We spent over $140
million on LinkedIn ads, and no one outperforms us on getting you
the lowest cost per lead and the maximum scale of your campaigns.
We're official LinkedIn partners, and you'll only deal with
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page of B2Linked.com to chat about your campaigns. We'd absolutely
love to work with you.
All right, let's jump right back into the interview with Parker.
So Parker, walk us through when you're inside of a LinkedIn account, you're inside of campaign manager, and you're looking to analyze some of these things, and decide what to test what to troubleshoot. Where are you looking? What are you doing? Teach us so that we can follow along?
Parker Williams 21:57
Yeah, absolutely. I'll tell a story about this. So one of my
responsibilities and B2Linked is consulting or helping. You can
purchase consulting time with a director. And so I've had the
opportunity to do that and one of the first things I do when
someone asked me to take a look at their account is I pull up the
campaign, or I go into the ad campaign group that we're running ads
in, that we're wanting to focus on and improve. And I make sure
that my timeframe is set to either 30 days or 90 days, I want as
much data as I can initially to analyze the performance of the
campaigns we're focusing on. And then depending on what offer, how
you have your campaigns set up, I'll make sure that those campaigns
are selected. And then the first thing I'm looking at is my click
through rate. So back to troubleshooting, I'm going to I'm going to
be in the campaign level, looking at all the campaigns. And looking
at the average of the click through rate. Let's say it's one
specific campaign, though, that we're wanting to look at, I'll make
sure that I select that one campaign, so it pops it up in the the
header bar, the campaign manager view. And that's usually where I
go initially. And then, depending on your objective, if you're
trying to get leads, if you're trying to get downloads, if you're
trying to get followers, then I'll look at that conversion rate.
And sometimes you'll have to export that data to be able to analyze
that, depending on that objective. So that's kind of where I go
initially. If I want to get into more information and a deeper
dive, I'll export it to an Excel sheet, and then I'll run like
pivot tables, and I'll do a little bit more digging so I can
analyze the ad copy, the ad imagery, maybe the offers, if you've
ran multiple offers.
AJ Wilcox 23:52
I really, really liked what you said, I follow the same process, I
will export from LinkedIn, and I will export specifically the ad
data. But when I get it into Excel, I build my pivot table by
campaign name. And that way I can look down the list and see, like
you said, any campaign that sticks out as being a really poor
performer, that's really what troubleshooting is looking for the
poor performers right, then once I found a campaign, I'll break
that campaign down to see the ads that make that up. And really
often I'll find that there might be two ads or maybe four ads that
have run inside that campaign. And one of them is actually doing
really well but the other one or the other three are the actual
poor performers. And so one quick thing we can do is just pause the
poor performers and turn the best one backup or or back on if it
were off.
Parker Williams 24:46
After listening to you talk about that. I think there's a few key
ingredients to troubleshooting that we need to discuss which would
one of the first ones would be benchmarks, knowing your benchmarks
and what to compare to troubleshooting is pretty useless if you
don't have any benchmarks.
AJ Wilcox 25:04
Great point, for those of you listening, Episode 15 of the podcast,
and we'll link to it down below in the show notes. Episode 15 is
all about benchmarks. And if you go and listen to that, you can
compare your own performance against benchmarks to see where we
are. Okay, keep going.
Parker Williams 25:20
Yeah, so I feel like benchmarks are a key ingredient. And then
we've talked about this already identifying being very specific on
your hurdle, that's one of the other ingredients is knowing your
hurdles. And the other key ingredients is, are the levers which
we've discussed. So I just wanted to hit on making sure that you
know your benchmarks, and you know your hurdles, and you know, your
levers you can pull. And you've identified them, and you've listed
them. I've got a noted document in my computer, I used to have it
on a piece of paper, but I refer to it all the time. What are my
hurdles? What are my benchmarks? And what's cool about this process
is, it doesn't only work for LinkedIn Ads, but this also works for
everything else you do in business, and even sometimes in life,
which not to get off of the topic of LinkedIn Ads. But I've found
myself with clients, I've had situations where I've, we've had
great performing campaigns, like our front end is working really
well, we're producing really good leads, we're producing really
good click through rates. And it gets to the sales team. And
they're coming back to us and saying, hey, we're not converting any
of these. Well, before we point fingers at advertising and saying,
hey, advertising is not working, because we're leads aren't
converting. What's that next hurdle? And sometimes I can advise the
sales team on what are the hurdles, what's the next thing that
you're sending them? Is it an email or calling them like? I'm able
to help them identify their next hurdle that they're dealing with.
So if you're a marketer have a small team or a big team, being able
to provide advice or direction for the sales team is also
beneficial, and build your value that you add to the company, not
just in advertising.
AJ Wilcox 27:11
So true, you could be the very best LinkedIn Ads professional on
the planet, and still totally fail if sales doesn't know how to how
to handle your leads. Or if you don't have a good enough offer to
advertise. I've said before, but you can only put so much lipstick
on a pig and it's not getting any prettier. Right? I thought it'd
be interesting to interject here. For those looking to troubleshoot
the conversion rate hurdle. If you are running lead generation form
campaigns, then what I like to do is, you will have a lead form
open rate that's can be interesting. But more often than not, I'm
just taking the number of leads and dividing it by the number of
clicks to get a conversion rate. And that's really simple, but when
you're running like a website visits campaign, for instance, or an
engagement campaign, and you're running the conversion tracking on
the website, LinkedIn's metrics won't tell you the whole picture
though. They will seek to tell more of a picture than what it
deserves. If you just look at the conversions column, it will show
you a number of conversions. But if you go into your like leads and
conversions view of campaign manager, you'll see that that number
is actually made up of two different metrics. One is last click
conversions, and one is view through conversions. And if you ask
me, it's not right for LinkedIn to claim the view through
conversions. Those are basically conversions that occurred from a
different marketing channel of yours that LinkedIn knows that that
member saw at least one of your ads in the last, you know, 30 days
or seven days, whatever you set your window to. So anytime I'm
doing this analysis, I don't use LinkedIn's conversions column, I
specifically pull the column that is last click conversions. Those
will tell you the ones the conversions that actually came because
of clicking one of your ads.
Parker Williams 29:05
I love it. The data LinkedIn provides is a little skewed sometimes.
That's another key ingredient to troubleshooting is making sure
you're you're pulling the right clicks. Because LinkedIn, we've
learned this, LinkedIn says if you look at the original view and
campaign manager and you look at clicks, those are all clicks to
your landing page. They're not all clicks to your lead form.
Sometimes they're clicking share, like, or the see more if your
text is long. So that's not actually true click through rate. So
making sure, like initially when I look at an account, I just
quickly glance at that click through rate. But if I want to really
know what the number is, I'm exporting the data into an Excel sheet
and looking at it that way.
AJ Wilcox 29:53
I so agree. Knowing the definitions of what each of the metrics
mean is really really important. Case in point, if you're running
any of the sponsored messaging ad formats, LinkedIn, in so many
different views inside of campaign manager, they will tell you that
you have a click through rate that is like 55% or higher. But when
you really look at it, you'll realize, oh, every time that LinkedIn
sees the word click there saying an open of that message was a
click, I mean, we have to change our definitions, we have to pull
that data out and recalculate our own click through rate of the
like sponsored message, or message ad clicks, divided by the number
of opens, just punctuating your point, we really do need to know
the definitions super valuable. Alright, so last question for you.
What advice would you have to give to a marketer who wanted to get
better at troubleshooting and testing?
Parker Williams 30:49
Yeah, I think I've kind of mentioned it already. But just being
super clear on your hurdles, and your levers you can pull when it
comes to the ad campaign you're running. Whether it's on LinkedIn,
Google, Facebook, or even your landing page, just being clear on
those hurdles. And those levers is a game changer to me. And I feel
like, you can go deep with those levers, too. So it's messaging is
broad. Right? Like just saying, hey, are levers in messaging Well,
what does that mean? Like? It's the ad copy. But like, what do you
change in the ad copy? Sometimes there's only so much you can
change about an E-book, like at least being clear that, hey, the
messaging is what we need to fix. But like, what are the things you
could pull off of your tool bag when it comes to messaging? Like,
what different types of ad copy like what kind of emotions? Should
we use fear? Should we use novelty? Should we use...? What types of
influence should we use this messaging to hopefully try and improve
click through rate? Should we talk to more of their pain points, or
the benefits of the the E book? So when we say lever messaging,
like, we actually mean a little bit more than just messaging.
AJ Wilcox 32:04
Yeah, I totally agree with that, I find that in troubleshooting,
we're oftentimes looking for the largest pain point. So if we take
a look at an ad, and we go, the imagery isn't great, but it sure
looks like the ad copy is, is really terrible. Let's take a swipe
at that, we may not have to redesign the image yet, we're going to
do something with the message. And let's say we fix that and click
through rate doubles, we might come back and see an image and say,
oh, let's make a change here and maybe we can improve another 10%.
And then we'll find another, like optimization we can make, and
maybe we can get an additional 5% performance. And so we're
alleviating the biggest pain that we see from an ad and then making
marginally better decisions about how to optimize it. So at first,
you'll make big, big pieces of difference. And then later on down
the road, you'll find that every change you makes a smaller
difference. That's okay. That is the process of optimization.
Parker Williams 33:06
Yeah. And one thing to add to the question you asked about, you
know, what do you need to do to be successful at troubleshooting
and outside of identifying hurdles and levers, being able to
prioritize those hurdles, and then prioritize those levers is very
crucial, because to your point, let's say the click through rate is
poor. And that's the hurdle you're first focusing on. And you pull
the offer lever before you even touch messaging, you just wasted a
lot of time and potential resources, like just changing the author
may not change the performance of the ad, like it could. The
messaging, which is yes, it has a big impact. But it's a quick,
like, advertising is all about being fast. And failing fast. I
never understood that before, when people would say that, but I do
now, with understanding troubleshooting, like, if you fell fast to
advertising, you're going to be really good at it. And being able
to prioritize where you need to fail next, basically is, is kind of
the key.
AJ Wilcox 34:09
And every failure teaches us something. That's why we call it
testing and not necessarily failing. Yeah, even if something is an
absolute failure, it still taught us something that we never want
to do, again, in the future, in that campaign or with that
messaging. And that's valuable. The longer we do it, and the more
tests we run, then the better marketers we're gonna get, it breaks
my heart when companies are making these super dramatic changes to
ads, and they don't have a set AB testing strategy, because you can
move things around and get better performance, but you didn't learn
anything along the way. And you paid for those learnings, you might
as well claim them.
Parker Williams 34:48
Yeah, you just brought up a great point to AJ. In advertising there
are variables everywhere. Advertising, marketing, sales, there are
variables everywhere and if you want to be good troubleshooting and
solving problems, solving hurdles that you deal with along that
sales funnel, limiting your variables is huge. I can't tell you how
many times when it comes to consulting or helping a new account
that we're taking over or looking at. They're running like five
different ads, there's different images, there's different intros,
there's different headlines, that data is useless. Because we don't
know what actually influenced that specific ad or that campaign.
But if we had all the same images, all the same headlines, and a
difference was the intro. We'd be able to say, with confidence that
the intro is what's impacting that and we would know where our
hurdle really is. Maybe it's not the image maybe it's not the
headline. Right now we're focusing on the intro, and that's what
we're trying to improve. So limiting your variables with the data's
is also another key ingredient.
AJ Wilcox 36:00
So true, it makes the test. Well, Parker, thanks so much for coming
on, and teaching us an ultra valuable principle. And being an in
full transparency one that I didn't know I wanted to cover in a
podcast episode. And Parker came to me and said, hey, there's this
really important principle, I think it'd be good to have an episode
on so Parker, thanks so much for driving that, I really think
there's been a ton of value here. Anything else you'd leave the
guests with,
Parker Williams 36:24
I'll just have fun. doing marketing, have fun. troubleshooting.
won't matter if you're not having fun, at the end of the day. If
you don't enjoy marketing, like go somewhere else. This is what
I've learned as a marketer, as sales. Like, if you're not having
fun doing it, then you're probably not in the right place.
AJ Wilcox 36:42
I agree. If you're not excited about learning, the results of the
last test that you ran, and you're eager to start another one, you
can still do your job, but you're not going to be fueled by what
else can I learn? What else can I do? And it's my firm belief that
marketers who approach it, like you said that they are excited they
want to learn and to approach it as a scientist and not necessarily
as an artist. I think your career is going to be much greener.
Awesome. Well, Parker, thanks so much for joining us. Just for
everyone here, I have a couple slides that I share. One is
specifically like helping you visualize where the hurdles are. And
then another slide that's all about benchmarks. So make sure if
that's interesting to you, go check those out. I've got the episode
resources for you coming right up. So stick around.
Speaker 4 37:36
Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more?
AJ Wilcox, take it away.
AJ Wilcox 37:47
As promised, here are the episodes resources. We made mention of
the benchmarking episode so go back and listen to that. That's
Episode 15. Plus, you'll find the link down below. I also included
the slides, the benchmark slides, and the hurdles slide that we
made reference to during the episode. So check the link out for
that. These are slides for my actual presentations that I give.
These are advanced LinkedIn tactics slides. So definitely check
them out if that was interesting to you. And if you are just
learning LinkedIn Ads, or you have a colleague or a friend who's
looking to learn, definitely check out the course that I did with
LinkedIn Learning, you'll see the link for it down below in the
show notes. But this is everything that you'll need in order to
become a solid starting advertiser. And because it's on LinkedIn
Learning, it's so so cheap, so definitely check that out. Also,
whatever podcast player you're listening on right now, look down
and hit that subscribe button, of course, only if you want to have
more of me in your ears. But yeah, hit it. And please do rate and
review the podcast. It helps other LinkedIn Ads professionals to
find out about the show. And you'd be doing me the biggest favor
you can do. With any feedback for the show, hit us up at
podcast@B2Linked.com. Let us know any feedback you have for the
show or topics you'd love for us to cover. I love to hear from our
listeners. All right, with that being said, we'll see you back here
next week. cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiative.