Nov 3, 2022
Show Resources
Here were the resources we covered in the episode:
Certified LinkedIn Marketing Experts program
NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox
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Show Transcript
Six LinkedIn Ads myths debunked on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show.
Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ
Wilcox.
Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! Over the year, we've heard a lot
of myths about LinkedIn Ads. Today, we're going to bust them like
Jamie and Adam, if you get the MythBusters reference. First off,
we've got some really cool stuff in the news. Matched and saved
audiences are now under one page called audiences. And this is
gradually being rolled out, so if you don't see it already in your
account, you may notice it soon. And I think this is a great
change. Anytime that we can get more information on one page, more
compactly, I'm usually a fan of it. And it does make sense to have
all different kinds of audiences, all in one location. Document ads
are also out and in full force. You can attach PDFs, PowerPoints,
really any kind of media that has multiple pages, and then you can
get them with a lead gen form. So for instance, you can say, for
the first three pages of this ebook, I want someone to be able to
scroll through it. But then once they reach page four, it displays
the lead gen form and they need to fill it out in order to
progress. It sounds really cool in theory, and it worked so well,
during the initial beta that didn't have lead gen forms, I thought
this was going to be an amazing ad format. But we've tested it
quite a bit and we haven't yet found better performance than
before, just with single image ads and a lead gen form. But I'd
love to hear about any of your experience if you're experiencing
anything differently. There's also a new feature called Media
Library. And it allows you to upload multiple images at a time, and
then use all those multiple images, up to five, to create multiple
ads at a time. And this is just creating image tests, because all
of these ads are going to have the same intro and the same
headline, but just with a different image. So pretty cool, if
you're testing your images. If it's rolled out to your account, you
should be able to access it within campaign manager by clicking
inside of a campaign that's either for single image or video ads,
and clicking on create ad, then when you click on upload for
images, it'll bring up the media library. The certified marketing
experts program is live. You've heard me before talk about getting
LinkedIn certified. And this is how you do it. There are quite a
few different levels, and they take time to graduate through them.
So if you haven't already go get started now. The link is in the
show notes. We've also noticed that the floor bids are gone in many
of the accounts we have access to. The way it used to work is that
you would enter a bid that was below the floor. And it used to pop
up a message telling you what the minimum bid is for that audience.
And it wouldn't let you run unless you put in a number that was
greater than that. But now on many of our accounts, I'd say at
least half, it pops up a message that says your bid of x may be too
low to reach your target audience, increase your bid for better
results. Now, initially, I expected that this change was because
the LinkedIn Audience Network clicks are significantly cheaper than
the floor bid to reach a LinkedIn audience. So if someone bids
below the floor, they would just be getting mostly traffic from the
LinkedIn Audience Network. But I kind of proved myself wrong on
this, because I went to go create a campaign, even with LAN turned
off and the same message still appears. I do think this is good
because I've always hated that there is a floor bid in order to
advertise on LinkedIn. That's never made sense to me. So I do like
this. But I haven't heard from LinkedIn why they did it. And it's
truthfully uncharacteristic of them. All right, without further
ado, let's hit it.
We're gonna jump into six different myths that we've heard about
LinkedIn Ads, and we're going to debunk them give you the
truth.
3:49
Myth Number One
Myth number one, LinkedIn Ads are too expensive. We have to start
out by saying that the word expensive, it's relative. If you look
at just the costs on LinkedIn compared to other platforms, those
front end costs, we see averages of $8 to $14 cost per click in
North America. And certainly that's going to be significantly
higher than other platforms, you might be paying $3 to $5 per click
on Facebook friends, but you do have to put this into perspective.
Because with other media, you're casting a really wide net in hopes
that your ideal target audience may represent part of where that
net lands. But with LinkedIn, we get to be so specific about our
targeting, that we make sure only our ideal customers are getting
hit with our ads. So you're really just shifting the costs. Like on
Facebook, you're going to pay less per click, but reaching a lot
more people who aren't qualified as part of your ideal audience. On
LinkedIn, we're paying a higher rate for them to reach only the
ones who matter. And we see this time and time again, when you
start looking at the way that LinkedIn leads translate into your
CRM. We see that even though the costs per click are three to five
times higher on LinkedIn than they are on something like Facebook,
when you start calculating your cost per sales qualified lead, on
the back end, we regularly see that the cost per sales qualified
lead from LinkedIn is half that of Facebook. So we pay a premium to
have much less waste. Of course, the platform really is truly
expensive compared to others. And it's possible that your business
may have been priced out of the market from using LinkedIn Ads,
just because those front end costs are so high. So if you can't
show an ROI, then yes, I agree with this myth. But otherwise,
especially compared to other platforms, LinkedIn is not too
expensive. And we see evidence of this because costs have been
rising. When I very first started the podcast, the average costs
per click on LinkedIn were like $6 to $8 in North America. And
they've kept rising more and more, not because LinkedIn is
arbitrarily raising prices, but because more and more advertisers
are finding value, and they flock to the platform and competition
has those costs per click rising. I'll also remind you that back in
2008, when the LinkedIn platform launched, the floor bid for
LinkedIn ads was $2. And even at the time, I heard a lot of
advertisers still saying that LinkedIn CPCs, were too high, even
back when they were $2. And now we're like $8 to $14, on average.
So if you're just getting started with LinkedIn Ads, I would
recommend a starting budget of at least $5,000. And realize that
those front end costs are going to be more expensive, but on the
back end, because the lead quality is so much better, they tend to
be cheaper. So watch your leads all the way through the funnel.
Episode 71 was all about that so make sure you go back and listen
to episode 71, on how to actually track those leads all the way
through the sales funnel. And there are certainly ways of bringing
costs down on LinkedIn. Some of the cool tricks that we've used are
sending traffic to your website or landing page with LinkedIn so
you know the traffic is amazing and then retarget them with both
Facebook and Google, which are fantastic technologies for staying
in front of those prospects at really low costs. And I'd also
recommend potentially using the LinkedIn Audience Network, because
then you'll get reach all around the web and on certain apps for
significantly lower costs than what you pay on just the LinkedIn
network.
Myth Number Two
Alright, Myth number two, LinkedIn ads don't work. Well, if they
didn't work, we wouldn't see the same level of adoption that we do.
If you're listening to this podcast, you're obviously taking the
LinkedIn Ads channel very seriously. And likely, you've seen a lot
of good results. So you may not be the ones who are saying this
myth. But we've definitely seen that if it's not working for you,
you're probably doing it wrong, or you just got priced out of the
market. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break. And then we'll dive
into Myth number three,
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7:54
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Myth Number Three
Alright, let's jump into Myth number three about audience sizes,
you've likely heard that LinkedIn audience sizes need to be over
300,000. We hear this from LinkedIn reps all the time. And if you
haven't listened to it, I would invite you to listen to episode 20
of this podcast, all about audience sizes. But what we suggest is
audience sizes between 20,000 to 80,000, we find under about 20,000
audiences are so small, it's really hard to get them to spend at
all. And so you really can't run much of a test. But as soon as
audiences get over about 80,000, there tends to be something about
that audience that we could then split it in half to learn
something about how those audiences react, we call this micro
segmentation. So for instance, if you're advertising to marketing
decision makers, that could just be one campaign that is, let's
say, job function of marketing with seniority of VP and above. But
instead, we would split that audience up into two separate
campaigns, one of just Marketing VPs and the other one of just
marketing C level, so CMOS. If your LinkedIn rep sees it, they're
probably going to tell you that your audience sizes are too small,
and you need to combine audiences. When I've heard this argument in
the past, it seems like they think that big because an audience
size is smaller, that you're not going to spend the whole budget.
But realize that when you start micro segmenting, you're still
reaching your entire total addressable market, you're just breaking
them up into smaller buckets. Whether it's one campaign or eight
campaigns, you're still reaching the same audience. You're just
segmenting them smaller so that you can learn from them. And
learning more about your audiences and their behavior, that's just
getting better data. Plus, I've also found that by micro
segmenting, it allows me to systematically approach targeting, so
that I don't leave anyone for my target audience out.
Myth Number Four
Okay, myth number four. If you aren't bidding high in the range,
the suggested bid range, you're scraping the bottom of the barrel.
I've heard this from LinkedIn reps who they look at the bid range.
And let's say we're bidding $12, but the suggested bid ranges like
$14 to $30, they'll tell us that if you're not bidding high enough,
you're not reaching the highest quality of people within that
audience. Well, this is definitely a myth, because we've run
several tests on lead quality based on bid price and every time we
came to the same conclusion, that bidding higher did not result in
leads of higher lead quality. All it did was just increase the cost
per plus, if your targeting is on point, then whatever traffic you
get will be qualified. So I think that just means that we should do
a better job of targeting if our lead quality is low. So to
reiterate, I have found no evidence to support the concept of
higher bidding, bringing higher quality leads. And I've had a
couple LinkedIn reps separately come and argue about this. And I've
asked them to bring me proof that they've seen the higher bidding
results in higher quality clicks, and neither have so please, if
you have this evidence, bring it on. The way that we view manual
bidding, your bids are essentially a control on the amount of
volume that you want. If your ad performance is great, you can
afford to bid lower and still get all the impressions and clicks
that you need. But if your ad performance is poor, meaning you
probably have lower click through rates, you might need to bid
higher to get more volume. But you still may not have to bid as
high as LinkedIn recommends. Remember, you just need to bid high
enough to fill your budget during the day. So if you have a huge
budget, you may have to bid significantly above the range that
LinkedIn recommends.
12:18
Myth Number Five
Myth number five, audience expansion should be used always. On
several occasions, I've had internal LinkedIn employees tell me
that audience expansion should be used on all campaigns, and they
just don't understand why I make the recommendation to always shut
it off. Their reasoning tends to be that we can't always know
whether we're targeting everyone in the buying committee, or even
everyone just in our target audience. They also argue that it
creates awareness because you're expanding your reach to those who
aren't currently in the market. And our response to that is it's
not about being in market or not. What audience expansion does is
it expands your reach to those outside of your ideal customer
persona period. And if you're being thoughtful about targeting, and
you use different targeting methods, and you can always expand into
lower senorities or larger companies, or even those who might later
graduate into your target audience. You can do that thoughtfully,
you don't need to leave it up to chance by clicking the audience
expansion box. When you turn on audience expansion, you lose
complete control over who your ads are shown to. It's definitely
not about generating awareness or expanding your reach to the
buying committee. It's about retaining control to expand your reach
thoughtfully and strategically, that you'd want to show your ads
to
13:33
Myth Number Six
Myth number six, you shouldn't touch your campaigns for 30 days.
We've heard this on several occasions that you really need to be
hands off until campaigns accrue data. You need to understand that
LinkedIn Ad learning period is usually about one to one and a half
days. So if you're running something for three to four days, and
it's spending at a pretty good clip, if performance is terrible,
you really can shut it off or pivot right then. Chances are that
trends are going to continue. So don't feel like you have to spend
thoughtlessly on something that doesn't work for 30 days, just
because you've been told you need to give it more time. Those front
end metrics do generate pretty quickly. So even though advertising
does take time to see results, you don't need to wait that long to
see general patterns or trends. All right, I've got the episode
resources for you coming right up. So stick around
14:32
Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more?
AJ Wilcox, take it away.
14:43
All right, we covered the new audiences feature, the document ads
feature, the new media library, and the certified LinkedIn
marketing experts program. Those links are all down in the show
notes. Also, if you haven't already listened to Episode 71 about
how to ascertain your Your LinkedIn ads ROI, definitely listened to
Episode 71. That's also linked to in the show notes. If you or
anyone that you know is looking to learn more about LinkedIn ads, I
highly recommend the course that I did with LinkedIn Learning. It's
linked in the show notes below and it is by far the most detailed
and the least expensive course out there. If this is your first
time listening, welcome, and definitely hit that subscribe button
if you found this to be useful. And if this is not your first time,
please do rate and review the podcast. It's a terrific no cost way
of supporting us with any thoughts questions or feedback for the
show, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being
said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your
LinkedIn Ads initiative!